The Year in Poetry (Vol. 86) | The Year in Poetryby Allen Hoey
The Year in Poetry by Allen Hoey
The best news of 1994, the publication of The Great Fires, Jack Gilbert's third collection issued over the past 32 years, is genuine cause for celebration. Gilbert's poems are as spare as his output, written in a style he has refined since Views of Jeopardy (1962), on through Monolithos (1982), trimming back the few excesses the early poems allowed, tempering them and remaining constant to his earliest influences, poems from The Greek Anthology and Waley's Chinese translations.
Typically, his poems begin in the middle of things and establish situation by accretion, so that it may be necessary to reread them immediately to get the fullest sense. The opening of "Measuring the Tyger" serves as an example:
Barrels of chains. Sides of beef stacked in vans.
Water buffalo dragging logs of teak in the river mud
outside Mandalay. Pantocrater in...
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