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List Price: $25.00Amazon.com's Price: $16.50 You Save: $8.50 (34%)as of 03/21/2010 15:28 EDT
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 811.54
EAN: 9780307270764
ISBN: 0307270769
Label: Knopf
Manufacturer: Knopf
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 80
Publication Date: April 07, 2009
Publisher: Knopf
Release Date: April 07, 2009
Studio: Knopf
Features:- ISBN13: 9780307270764
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
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.
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
"The Dance Most of All" offers clear evidence that Gilbert's powers have waned. The searing honesty, wisdom and beauty which characterized his two previous collections are present but in a much less passionate way. There are
no poems of the oracular efficacy of " Dante Dancing" or "Failing and Flying".
While it may not be fair to criticize a poet's later work by reference to those preceding it, the drop-off in
intensity is intensely felt. There are memorable lines and tidy poems ... Read More
Rating:  -
Jack Gilbert's printed output is slim but among the most powerful poetry you will ever read. Refusing Heaven bespoke a maturity, a clarity of vision and language that literally blew my mind. The Dance Most of All is even better (an impossibility in my view). The same subjects are present, the death of his beloved Japanese wife, Memories of Pittsburgh, of the places he's lived and visited throughout the world but it is in fact a travelogue of the human soul. Gilbert deserves ten thousand stars. he ... Read More
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Dewey Decimal Number: 811.54
EAN: 9780307270764
ISBN: 0307270769
Label: Knopf
Manufacturer: Knopf
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 80
Publication Date: April 07, 2009
Publisher: Knopf
Release Date: April 07, 2009
Studio: Knopf