Poet Island Press

Linda Gregg

Linda Gregg has been the recipient of many awards for her work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Foundation Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Whiting Writer's Award, as well as multiple Pushcart Prizes. She was the 2003 winner of the Sara Teasdale Award and the 2006 PEN/Voelcker Award winner for Poetry.

“Linda Gregg brings us back to poetry. . . . She is original and mysterious, one of the best poets in America,” says Gerald Stern.

Her latest work, In The Middle Distance, (and dedicated to Jack Gilbert below) was mostly composed on the island of Paros in Greece, where she often spent months alone, writing in a lovely little house in the village of Lefkes. Gerald Stern, (we’ll hear more about him next month) says that Linda is “original and beautiful.” He’s right, and she is also exact and very attentive to the intensity of line and meaning in her work. Well known for her intelligence and sense of humanity, she is more than worthy of our careful reading of her poems.

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Jack Gilbert

Gilbert is the author of Refusing Heaven (2005), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992 (1996).

He has been awarded a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Monolithos won the Stanley Kunitz Prize and the American Poetry Review Prize, and Views of Jeopardy won the Yale Younger Poets Series. Both books were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

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.”

His latest work Refusing Heaven, presents further evidence of his deadly serious, beautifully clear poetry. His tightly constructed, yet amazingly fluid work shows a lifetime of attention to detail; of human existence, of the world around us, and much of that which we cannot reach with either the mind or the body. What’s very important to know about Jack’s poems, is that he means them.

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Barry Tagrin

Barry Tagrin is the founding Director of Hellenic International Studies in the Arts. He also coordinates the writing center there and teaches the advanced workshops. One of the top lyric poets of our time, Tagrin’s dynamic, emotion-laden poems reveal a world rarely seen in such brilliant, three-dimensional depth.

His latest book, Collage of the Soul, is the first in our new True Visitor Books series. Tagrin writes with explosive intensity of the dissolution of his marriage of twenty-eight years, and the landscape of eroticism and adventure that followed. He evokes too, with wisdom and tenderness, the facets of his new marriage. Here the struggle for identity and truth is beautifully woven into poems that work to fasten harmony and understanding to an intense and often unyielding desire for newness. Active in the San Francisco poetry and political scene for many years, Tagrin now lives permanently on the Greek island of Paros.

“A rich mixture of complexity and clarity pack astonishing strength into Tagrin’s powerful and intelligent lines. The poems sweep across one’s mind with a soulful, musical force, leaving the heart full, if slightly stunned.” PoetsRevealed.com