03/05 - Time: 7:00 p.m.

Local Poets Reading Work by Jack Gilbert, Northampton Poet Laureate

About Gilbert's work, the poet James Dickey said, "He takes himself away to a place more inward than is safe to go; from that awful silence and tightening, he returns to us poems of savage compassion." Gilbert is the author of Transgressions: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books 2006), Refusing Heaven (2005), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992 (1996). His poetry has been featured in The American Poetry Review, The Quarterly, Poetry, Ironwood, The Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, and other journals. He has been awarded a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. His second book, Monolithos (1981) won the Stanley Kunitz Prize and the American Poetry Review Prize, and his first book, Views of Jeopardy (1962),won the Yale Younger Poets Series. Both books were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Gilbert was the 1999-2000 Grace Hazard Conkling writer-in-residence at Smith College and a visiting professor and writer-in-residence at the University of Tennessee in 2004. Currently he is Poet Laureate of Northampton, Mass. This reading is part of our fifth annual Poetry Reading Series that takes place on the first Wednesday of the month from October to June. Free and open to all. [excerpted and adapted from http<://www.poets.org/ poet.php/prmPID/1275>]


This event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served. Support has been provided by the Friends of Forbes Library. Please forward this email to all your poetry loving friends.

Admission: Free

Event Website: http://www.forbeslibrary.org

Location: Forbes Library (wheelchair accessible)

Contact Information

Lisa Downing
413-587-1017
ldowning@forbeslibrary.org