Gathered in this volume readers will find more than fifty years of poems by the incomparable Jack Gilbert, from his Yale Younger Poets prize-winning volume to glorious late poems, including a section of previously uncollected work.<br>  <br> There is no one quite like Jack Gilbert in postwar American poetry. After garnering early acclaim with <i>Views of Jeopardy</i> (1962), he escaped to Europe and lived apart from the literary establishment, honing his uniquely fierce, declarative style, with its surprising abundance of feeling. He reappeared in our midst with <i>Monolithos</i> (1982) and then went underground again until <i>The Great Fires</i> (1994), which was eventually followed by <i>Refusing Heaven</i> (2005), a prizewinning volume of surpassing joy and sorrow, and the elegiac <i>The Dance Most of All</i> (2009). Whether his subject is his boyhood in working-class Pittsburgh, the women he has loved throughout his life, or the bittersweet losses we all face, Gilbert is by turns subtle and majestic: he steals up on the odd moment of grace; he rises to crescendos of emotion. At every turn, he illuminates the basic joys of everyday experience.<br>  <br> Now, for the first time, we have all of Jack Gilbert's work in one essential volume: testament to a stunning career and to his place at the forefront of poetic achievement in our time.