The Dance Most of All: Poems
by Jack Gilbert
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jack GilbertEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-04-07
ISBN: 0307270769
Number of pages: 80
Publisher: Knopf
Book Reviews of The Dance Most of All: Poems
Book Review: Stunning indeed.
Summary: 5 Stars
Jack Gilbert, The Dance Most of All (Knopf, 2009)
My run of excellent poetry continues (though it did die, however briefly, a few days after this review was written; cf. Let's Talk Honestly: My Poetry review earlier this issue) with Jack Gilbert's National Book Critics Circle Award-winning 2009 tome. From the opening lines, you know you're dealing with someone who is very, very good at what he does:
"It pleases him that the villa is on a mountain
flayed bare by the great sun. All around
are a thousand stone walls in ruin. He likes knowing
the house was built by the king's telegrapher...."
("Everywhere and Forever")
Observation and history intertwined and not a word more than is necessary. Sentence structure is standard, with just a bit of word choice ("flayed bare by the great sun") to distinguish it from prose--but distinguished it is, and there is once again a sense of the thinness of the line between prose and poetry, but at the same time that understanding that the less finesse with which you straddle it, the wider it becomes. (As I mentioned before, Let's Talk Honestly. When you pitch headlong onto the poetry side of the chasm, you run to doggerel...)
Now, we're all aware of books that start off with a bang and then fall off the proverbial cliff, but that generally doesn't happen with poetry; it's tough to fake quality, and so once you know that you're going to be thrilled with this book, you'll immerse yourself in its pleasures. Yes, it's that good. Gilbert drops the formality eventually, though even his raunchiest moments seem to come with a curious distance to them (this, perhaps, is the reason the jacket copy hastened to qualify this as a "late-in-life" collection), but he never allows the sharp eyes and the ear for diction to slip. In some odd way, Gilbert's work reminds me of Hayden Carruth's, though I've never been able to quantify that link in my head; I'm just throwing it out there for reference. In any case, this is a phenomenal little book, and you want it. A shoo-in for my beast reads of the year list come December. **** ½
Summary of The Dance Most of All: Poems
A remarkable late-in-life collection, elegiac and bracing, from master poet Jack Gilbert, whose Refusing Heaven captivated the poetry world and won the National Book Critics Circle Award as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.In these characteristically bold and nuanced poems, Gilbert looks back at the passions of a life?the women, and his memories of all the stages of love; the places (Paris, Greece, Pittsburgh); the mysterious and lonely offices of poetry itself. We get illuminating glimpses of the poet?s background and childhood, in poems like ?Going Home? (his mother the daughter of sharecroppers, his father the black sheep in a family of rich Virginia merchants) and ?Summer at Blue Creek, North Carolina,? a classic scene of pulling water from the well, sounding the depths.
The title of the collection is drawn from the startling ?Ovid in Tears,? in which the poet figure has fallen and is carried out, muttering faintly: ?White stone in the white sunlight . . . Both the melody / and the symphony. The imperfect dancing / in the beautiful dance. The dance most of all.? Gilbert reminds us that there is beauty to be celebrated in the imperfect??a worth / to the unshapely our sweet mind founders on??and at the same time there is ?the harrowing by mortality.? Yet, without fail, he embraces the state of grief and loss as part of the dance.
The culmination of a career spanning more than half a century of American poetry, The Dance Most of All is a book to celebrate and to read again and again.
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