Views of Jeopardy

Book excerpt: A collection that illuminates everyday experience, Views of Jeopardy is the 58th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets In an essay on his own work in 19 New American Poets of the Golden Gate, Jack Gilbert writes that "I am by nature drawn to exigence, compression, selection. . . . One of the special pleasures in poetry for me is accomplishing a lot with the least means possible." Gilbert's poetry is distinguished by sparse lyricism, forthright clarity of tone, and controlled emotion regarding everyday life and relationships. In his foreword to Views ofJeopardy, Fitts identifies the origins of this approach, calling Gilbert's "abrupt hard mode of expression" the result of preoccupation with "alienation from one's kind, the painful throwing back of the artist upon himself, the compulsive elaboration of the details of a personal myth."