Refusing heaven

More than a decade after Jack Gilbert's The Great Fires, this highly anticipated new collection shows the continued development of a poet who has remained fierce in his avoidance of the beaten path. In Refusing Heaven, Gilbert writes compellingly about the commingled passion, loneliness, and sometimes surprising happiness of a life spent in luminous understanding of his own blessings and shortcomings: "The days and nights wasted ... Long hot afternoons / watching ants while the cicadas railed / in the Chinese elm about the brevity of life." Time slows down in these poems, as Gilbert creates…