Smith Writer-In-Residence Reads from Recent Work

Jack Gilbert, poet/author of "Monolithos" and the award-winning "View of Jeopardy," will read from his third collection of poems, "The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992," at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, November 16, in the Neilson Library Browsing Room. Sponsored by the Smith College Poetry Center, the event is free and open to the public.

Gilbert's first volume of poems, "Views of Jeopardy," received the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1962 and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. "Monolithos: Poems, 1962 and 1982," also nominated for the Pulitzer, was awarded the Stanley Kunitz Prize and the American Poetry Review Prize. In a review of "Monolithos," poet David St. John praised Gilbert for the "stoniest and most aesthetic Romanticism in American poetry."

"The Great Fires: Poems, 1982-1992" stays true to the sparse, concrete style that distinguishes Gilbert's work. His poems often wrestle with the nature of knowledge and perception, and he chooses to address these issues in language that is stark and powerful. Gilbert's poems cut to the quick; they are embedded with short, lucid insights and quick, insightful observations. He paints and contemplates his landscapes with precision, clarity, and tenderness.

Gilbert's work has appeared in many anthologies and in such journals as The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review and The Kenyon Review. He is also the author of "Kochan," a collection of elegies, and the recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships.

Gilbert is this year's Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College.

The reading will be followed by bookselling and signing. For more information, contact Cindy Furtek in the Poetry Center office at (413) 585-4891 or Ellen Doré Watson, Director, at (413) 585-3368.

November 5, 1999