The Double Task [Paperback]

Gray Jacobik (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1998

WINNER OF THE JUNIPER PRIZE The poems in this finely honed collection are of two kinds: those that seek to represent the world in its ephemerality, and those that generate a world's unfolding. Along a spectrum of various oppositions, in landscape and love poems, and in those that speak of music, painting, and film, Gray Jacobik enacts her double task: to bring our world palpably close and to transform that experience into art.

Editorial Reviews

From Kirkus Reviews

Winner of the Juniper Prize, this volume of Jacobiks impressionistic verse celebrates feeling over intellect (one can over- think a thing), which partly explains her lack of clarity in poems that awkwardly incorporate cultural allusions into an odd polysyllabic vocabulary. In The Election, Jacobik declares herself the true heir to Anne Sexton (not a great poet), but without Sextons fears and mad self-absorption. Instead, she embraces the everydayTheres too much of life to take inin her affirmations of her own sexuality, music, and nature. But her imprecision causes sentimentality and confused thinking: In The Breakfast Room, she speaks of ephemerality become tangible; in Lines, her distinction between how we read prose and poetry is simply odd; and in Figuration, about her poet friend who eschews metaphor, she reveals her own misunderstanding of poetics. Anecdotal poems find little justification beyond their peculiarity: A man in an elevator ejaculates against her skirt (Darkness); an afternoon sexual encounter takes places in the house where Clover Adams committed suicide (A Prelapsarian Mood Piece). Dead deer and a crow eating a small creature make Jacobik think, not surprisingly, of deathtypical of the tautological imagination displayed here. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review

Read these poems silently first and feel as if you've entered a painting and had the opportunity to explore its areas of light and shadow. Then read them aloud to savor their rhythms and the author's mid-range voice, the most piercing and poignant, as she relates in her title poem, "The Double Task." Then give them to someone you love, who perhaps reads poetry, but also to the frail of heart, to those whose senses need cleansing and renewal, to those who need to make a space in their life for thinking, reflecting, and feeling. I like these poems: their first-reading accessibility, their unfolding upon rereading, their valuation of the feminine and daily, their way of making a cultural landscape intimate. I read them slowly over the course of days, usually in the morning when I take my coffee outdoors. Afterwards, I always noticed some new details during my return walk, heard the street music, felt the sun penetrating inward and seeming to reach even my bones. This sense of heightened awareness, recognition of the richness of life, and occasional transcendence are what poetry does better than any other art. Jacobik's poems add to that legacy. -- From Independent Publisher

The Banquet
The Bed Of Music
Bodies And Clothes
Brain Teasers
The Breakfast Room
The Buck In The Snow
The Chinese Chestnut Breeze
The Circle Theatre
The Composer
Darkness
A Delicate Harmonic
The Discovery
The Double Task
Dust Storm
Economies
The Election
Figuration
First Marriage
Flamingos
Funereal
The Last Of Our Embraces Transformed From The First
Lines
Lost Trains
The Movie Fan
November
Parrots
The Past
A Prelapsarian Mood Piece
The Quilt Show
The Reunion
Sandwoman
Sappho Views Her X-rays
Sappho's Voice
A Serious Sweetness
Skirts
Sounds Better Than Human Silence
The Spinning
Sylvia Plimack Mangold Paints
Three Full Seasons And One Cut Short
Turkeys In August
Under The Dome Of This Sky
Vines And Cathedral Lines
The Visitation
The Wooden Egg
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 75 pages
• Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Pr (July 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1558491422
• ISBN-13: 978-1558491427
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,095,612 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Gray Jacobik is an American poet whose poems and essays have appeared in literary magazines and journals and in several anthologies. She is the winner of The Yeats Prize, the Emily Dickinson Prize, and in 2009 "The Skeptic's Prayer" received the 2009 Third Coast Poetry Prize. The Double Task received The Juniper Prize and was nominated for The James Laughlin Award and The Poet's Prize. The Surface of Last Scattering was selected by X. J. Kennedy as the winner of the X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize. Brave Disguises received the AWP Poetry Series Award. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize more than twenty times, most recently in 2009 (for "Oysters" Southern Women's Review). In 2002 she was the Robert Frost Poet-in-Residence at The Frost Place. For several years, as a professor of literature, she taught at Eastern Connecticut State University, and from 2003 until 2009, she taught on the faculty of the Stonecoast MFA Program. Little Boy Blue: A Memoir in Verse is her most recent collection, published by CavanKerryPress. For more details and to read and hear poems, please visit Gray's website at www.grayjacobik.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exuberant and startling, September 11, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Double Task (Paperback)

Poems like "Prelapsarian Mood Piece" and "Sounds Deeper than Human Silence" surprised and exhilarated me with their strategies of combining images. Dazzlingly inventive use of metaphor and montage makes for brilliant, passionate poems that I keep going back to study. Don't miss this one!

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars beautiful, April 18, 2004

By 

[e-mail] "[e-mail]" (Beaumont, tx USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Double Task (Paperback)

This is beautiful work. I hate to use cliche words, but Jacobik writes with a gracefulness and musicality (and music is everywhere) that makes her poetry a true joy to read.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Double Task, February 10, 2000

By 

Justin Koelsch (Amston, Connecticut.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Double Task (Paperback)

What a joy to read the poetry of Gray Jacobik. Her imagery is lush and vibrant, evoking images that stay with one throughout the coming days. Skirts and Dust Storm are just two examples of Jacobik's gift. For those who seek great poetry, this book is a must-read.