Monolithos, Poems 1962 and 1982 is the second book of poetry by American poet Jack Gilbert

Jack Gilbert

-Life and career:Born and raised in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania neighborhood of East Liberty, he attended Peabody High School then worked as a door-to-door salesman, an exterminator, and a steelworker...

. It was nominated for all three major American book awards: the National Book Critics Circle Award

National Book Critics Circle Award

The National Book Critics Circle Award is an annual award given by the National Book Critics Circle to promote the finest books and reviews published in English....

, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

The Pulitzer Prize in Poetry has been presented since 1922 for a distinguished volume of original verse by an American author. However, special citations for poetry were presented in 1918 and 1919.-Winners:...

, and the American Book Award

American Book Award

The American Book Award was established in 1978 by the Before Columbus Foundation. It seeks to recognize outstanding literary achievement by contemporary American authors, without restriction to race, sex, ethnic background, or genre...

. http://www.pulitzer.org The same year Monolithos was published, Gilbert's wife Michiko Nogami died of cancer.

Released by Alfred A. Knopf

Alfred A. Knopf

Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. is a New York publishing house, founded by Alfred A. Knopf, Sr. in 1915. It was acquired by Random House in 1960 and is now part of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group at Random House. The publishing house is known for its borzoi trademark , which was designed by co-founder...

 in a 1982 hardcover edition, Monolithos came twenty years after Views of Jeopardy, which won Gilbert the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition

Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition

The Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition is an annual event of Yale University Press aiming to publish the first collection of a promising American poet...

 in 1962.

A subsequent paperback edition of Monolithos was released by Graywolf Press in 1984. However, the limited availability of this edition has caused the book's value to climb from its original six-dollar publication price to amounts between $100 and $250, depending on the seller.

The book is divided into two sections: One - 1962 contains revised and collected poems from Views of Jeopardy, while Two [Monolithos] 1982 consists of new poems, written mainly on the Greek islands of Paros

Paros

Paros is an island of Greece in the central Aegean Sea. One of the Cyclades island group, it lies to the west of Naxos, from which it is separated by a channel about wide. It lies approximately south-east of Piraeus. The Municipality of Paros includes numerous uninhabited offshore islets...

 and Santorini

Santorini

Santorini , officially Thira , is an island located in the southern Aegean Sea, about southeast from Greece's mainland. It is the largest island of a small, circular archipelago which bears the same name and is the remnant of a volcanic caldera...

. Gilbert stayed there with the poet Linda Gregg

Linda Gregg

Linda Alouise Gregg is an American poet.-Biography:Although born just miles northwest of New York City, Ms. Gregg grew up on the other side of the country, in Marin County, California. She received both her Bachelor of Arts, in 1967, and her Master of Arts, in 1972, from San Francisco State College...

 during their marriage. http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19350

Of the title, Gilbert writes in the foreword, "Monolithos means single stone, and refers to the small hill behind our house which gave the place we lived its name. It is the tip of a non-igneous stone island buried in debris when most of Thira blew apart 3,500 years ago."

One * 1962

• The Abnormal Is Not Courage
• Between Poems
• Perspective He Would Mutter Going to Bed
• And She Waiting
• Don Giovanni On His Way to Hell
• The Plundering of Circe
• Island and Figs
• On Growing Old In San Francisco
• County Musician
• I'll Try to Explain About the Fear
• Rain
• Poetry Is a Kind of Lying
• It May Be No One Should Be Opened
• New York, Summer
• In Dispraise of Poetry
• Susanna and the Elders
• For Example
• The Night Comes Every Day to My Window
• The Sirens Again
• Before Morning in Perugia
• Orpheus in Greenwich Village
• Alba
• Ostinato Rigore
• A Bird Sings to Establish Frontiers
• Bartleby at the Wall
• The Whiteness, the Sound, and Alcibiades

Two * [Monolithos] * 1982

• All the Way From There to Here
• Not Part of Literature
• Trying to Be Married
• Registration
• More Than Friends
• That Tenor of Which the Night Birds Are a Vehicle
• Walking Home Across the Island
• Mistrust of Bronze
• Angelus
• A Kind of World
• Leaving Monolithos
• Divorce
• Remembering My Wife
• Pewter
• Night After Night
• Hunger
• Sects
• They Call It Attempted Suicide
• Miniscus
• Who's There
• Meaning Well
• Template
• Siege
• Translation Into the Original
• Burning and Fathering: Accounts of My Country
• The Fashionable Heart
• Breakfast
• Losing
• The Rainy Forests of Northern California
• Il Mio Tesoro
• Don Giovanni in Trouble
• The Movies
• Byzantium Burning
• They Will Put My Body Into the Ground
• Love Poem
• Elephant Hunt in Guadalajara
• Pavane
• Loyalty
• Song
• Getting Ready
• Sur Ponticello
• The Cucumbers of Praxilla of Sicyon
• A Description of Happiness in København
• New Hampshire Marble
• My Marriage With Mrs. Johnson
• Heart Skidding
• Games
• My Graveyard in Tokyo
• Alone on Christmas Eve in Japan
• Textures
• The Revolution
• Mexico
• Another Grandfather
• Singing in My Difficult Mountains
• Threshing the Fire