Views Of Jeopardy

Gilbert, Jack

Edité par Yale University Press, New Haven, 1962

A propos de cet article

First edition. As new in dust jacket. Issued as Volume 58 in the prestigious The Yale Series of Younger Poets. Dust jacket drawing by Philip Kerr and photographic portrait of the poet by E.W. Holden. An absolutely superior copy of the poet's legendary first book. This copy is specially signed by Gilbert in a clear and distinct hand opposite the title page and next to his printed name and the woodcut portrait of him created originally in 1960 by Gianna Gelmetti. Gilbert recollected in an interview in The Paris Review in 2005 that "I had gone to Italy and fallen in love, for the first time, with an extraordinarily beautiful woman, but her sister convinced me that I should give her up. She said, You're never going to hold a job. You're not going to be able to support Gianna. She should have babies. Gianna was made to have babies. And it was true. But that was an awful thing for me to do; I should have talked it over with Gianna. Anyhow, I was gathering all of my things to leave Italy. Gianna's brother-in-law Cleve Moffet, a writer, had an application for some kind of competition. He talked about it but decided he wasn't going to do anything with it. When he got up to go to lunch he picked up the form and threw it in my lap saying, You should do it. I forgot about it until I was leaving to go back to America. The application must have gotten mixed in with the stuff I was packing. When I got to New York and was throwing things away, I must have found it and sent it in. I don't know. I forgot about it. Later, I was living in the East Village and this one night there was pounding on the door and there was Cleve standing in the hall. He was agitated and said, They're looking all over for you. I asked who, and he explained that somebody wanted to give me the Yale prize. I didn't know what to do, how to express it. I took him out with my two friends and we had milkshakes. The next day I roamed about trying to find a way to feel about what had happened. I finally lay down under the Brooklyn Bridge to try to feel something. I lay there all afternoon, and then I called the people at Yale." "Jack Gilbert was born in Pittsburgh in 1925. He failed out of high school and worked as an exterminator and door-to-door salesman before being admitted, thanks to a clerical error, to the University of Pittsburgh. There he met the poet Gerald Stern, his exact contemporary. Gilbert started writing poetry, he says, because Stern did. After college he traveled to Paris and worked briefly at the Herald Tribune before spending several years in Italy. He returned to America-first to San Francisco and then to New York-where his career as a poet began. In 1962 Gilbert's first book, VIEWS OF JEOPORADY, won The Yale Younger Poets Prize and was considered for the Pulitzer Prize alongside collections by Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams. The New York Times called Gilbert "inescapably gifted," Theodore Roethke and Stanley Kunitz praised his candor and control, and Stephen Spender hailed his work as "witty, serious, and skillful." He was photographed for Glamour and Vogue, and was widely feted by the literary establishment. The finest copy of this important debut that I have encountered in 40 years of searching.

N° de réf. du vendeur 1623

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: Views Of Jeopardy
• Éditeur: Yale University Press, New Haven
• Date de parution: 1962
• Reliure: Couverture rigide
• Édition: Edition originale
• État de la jaquette: Jaquette