By Jack Gilbert

A outstanding late-in-life assortment, elegiac and bracing, from grasp poet Jack Gilbert, whose Refusing Heaven captivated the poetry international and received the nationwide e-book Critics Circle Award in addition to the l. a. instances ebook Prize.

In those usually daring and nuanced poems, Gilbert appears to be like again on the passions of a life—the ladies, and his stories of the entire levels of affection; the locations (Paris, Greece, Pittsburgh); the mysterious and lonely workplaces of poetry itself. We get illuminating glimpses of the poet’s history and youth, in poems like “Going Home” (his mom the daughter of sharecroppers, his father the black sheep in a relatives of wealthy Virginia retailers) and “Summer at Blue Creek, North Carolina,” a vintage scene of pulling water from the good, sounding the depths.

The identify of the gathering is drawn from the startling “Ovid in Tears,” within which the poet determine has fallen and is performed, muttering faintly: “White stone within the white solar . . . either the melody / and the symphony. The imperfect dancing / within the appealing dance. The dance such a lot of all.” Gilbert reminds us that there's good looks to be celebrated within the imperfect—“a worthy / to the unshapely our candy brain founders on”—and whilst there's “the harrowing by way of mortality.” but, with out fail, he embraces the kingdom of grief and loss as a part of the dance.

The fruits of a profession spanning greater than part a century of yankee poetry, The Dance such a lot of All is a booklet to have fun and to learn repeatedly.