Abstract
Quinney discusses the life and work of Jack Gilbert, a writer of great deliberation and a poet of midlife and old age. She focuses on the work of Gilbert's poetic maturity, displayed in his last two volumes, Refusing Heaven and The Great Fires. Quinney discloses that Gilbert is in some respects an ideal writer to live into old age and write about it because he has always resolutely exploited his own experience. She rationalizes that Gilbert's relation to his own life is that of a scholar's to a difficult foreign language that requires vigilance to translate.