Jack Gilbert is a major figure in American poetry, but has always been a total outsider, defiantly unfashionable and publishing only four books in five decades. Initially associated with the Beats, he left America after winning the Yale Younger Poets Prize with "Views of Jeopardy" in 1962, eking out a living for many years on Greek islands. His second collection, "Monolithos", appeared twenty years later in 1982, but he made his strongest impression on American readers with the late work published in his last two books, "The Great Fires" (1994) and "Refusing Heaven" (2005), winner of the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award.