This is one of the most beautiful books of modern poetry out there. I am so sad that it's out of print. The poems, which span a period of time in which Jack Gilbert got a divorce and moved to Greece, are extreemly emotional and expertly crafted.

If you are planning a wedding and don't know "who" to ask the multitude of questions you have, this book is for you. Sherri Goodall and five other wedding experts have put together the ultimate wedding planning book. From etiquette to the bizarre and beyond, this book captures the essence of planning for your very special day! Recommended!

I recently moved house and had to consider carefully which books to take with me for a time abroad. I'd have to pay for the weight I carried. I eventually took Gilbert as one of my only poets. I also took the short stories of Hawthorne. Both are spare metaphysicians with a sense of humor. I don't go six months without picking up this book and reading something in it. Very few poets can stand up to that kind of revisiting. Bleak humour and refusal to be falsely comforted. An eye for what you may remember at the end of your life.

Many of these are poems about women - wives and how he came to leave them, lovers and how they came to die and how he mourned, a young married mother whose baby he threw in the air and murmured PITTSBURGH to in between their trysts. Short, tender, very emotional poems from a man discinclined to easy emotion or postures. Poems to read at difficult junctures in your life and get perspective from. And, finally, poems with a great reach of ambition unusual nowadays in American verse. Poems that claim to talk to God, or at least sit with him for a while on the front porch.

T.S.Eliot once said that many of the most successful writers have published either a lot or very little. Gilbert has chosen the later strategy. Like Cavafy, he has been scrupulous about giving the reader only the very best and most carefully crafted writing from his desk. The result is a small but extremely distinguished body of work that should be remembered as among the best of his generation. Buy this book. Read it closely. The poems will make you strong.

I have both Monolithos and the Great Fires. I remember and reread poems from both these volumes, continuously. Not all the poems, for me, are memorable, but many are. This is much much better than average for most poetry books by the typically annointed "major" poets. Gilbert takes care and time to read, his words are set in, play out through space and silence. The grief and loss he expresses are not the point for me, most poetry is about this, but he implicates his own sentimentality. And I like the "form factor" of his poems, the line breaks, line lengths, etc. And finally, I like the way he approaches his "career" which seems, to be an "un-career." Very little self-promotion, conference hopping, log rolling, etc.

This book could be considered a dangerous piece of work by modern standards. In the continuing trend of shirking accountability and rationalizing deviant behavior, the concept of responsibility has been lost. In some cases the concept of responsibility is not merely lost, but is even confronted and disparaged. This issue becomes extremely salient when applied to criminal justice, where a multitude of concepts must reify questions of responsiblity every day.

Kamerman mentions that this book has been constructed on a foundation of psychological, occupational, organizational, and societal perspectives, and rightly so. Each of these avenues of thought presents a contrasting view. There is a little battle in each one of these words. How do we make decisions? Is it free will or societal pressure? Do we use cold logic or emotion? Is it necessary that we employ an absolutist or relativist approach? Ah, "absolutist or relativist", so there is an ethical tie...not only an ethical tie, but an ethical framework from which each decision should eminate. Somewhere between deontological and teleogical perspectives; between idealistic and contextual propositions, is an answer. Not necessarily the right answer, mind you, and definitely not an indisputed one, but rather a functional one. Therin is the basis for this book. Disaggregate the argument into its ethical components and then make a decision by negotiating responsibility; a daunting task which Kamerman approaches in a bold, successful manner, from his pensive input to each contribution he includes.