Passing Through Customs: New and Selected Poems - Hardcover

Ruark, Gibbons

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807123617 ISBN 13: 9780807123614

Publisher: Louisiana State Univ Pr, 1999

Synopsis

Gibbons Ruark is a poetic naturalist, bending close to his subject to report with precision the complexity of beauty we overlook in our haste. A truly imaginative writer as well, however, Ruark gives back to us not merely mirrored documentation but reflections fully colored by his sight and his spirit; like water and sky, both subject and poet are illuminated in his poems.Passing Through Customs, a retrospective of thirty years' work, is arranged in clusters of image, feeling, and thought, like runs of a particular kind of music. The reader moves from two coastal poems, years apart on the calendar of the poet's career, to poems about family and friends, through shadows and solitudes of elegies, into sunlit homages to the saving grace of art. There are evocations of Ruark's beloved and strife-torn Ireland, others of Italy's bounty, portraits of now missed faces, and the abiding presence of his wife. This gallery of words, so strongly affecting, steadies and moves us at once.Passing Through Customs leads us into the reaches of Ruark's sensibility, certainly, but also through inherited forms and ceremonies enriching to us all.

About this title

About the Author

Gibbons Ruark 's poems have been previously collected in Rescue the Perishing, Keeping Company, Reeds, and A Program for Survival. A member of the English faculty at the University of Delaware since 1968, he lives with his wife in Landenberg, Pennsylvania.

Review

"Out of his whole career of unswerving devotion to poetry, Gibbons Ruark has distilled a book both rich and rare. Ruark is a master musician; our common language, his instrument. How often he reaches out for the ineffable; how often he succeeds in grasping it. You would have to sift through the life's work of a great many poets to find another hundred pages nearly as fine as these." -- X. J. Kennedy

"This brilliant and beautiful book -- the work of thirty years -- firmly establishes Gibbons Ruark's important place in American poetry. In its sensuality, craft, force, and intelligence, PASSING THROUGH CUSTOMS reacquaints the reader with what has been too often lost to contemporary poetry -- the ceremony and music of the occasion. Ruark is the sage 'singing-master' that Yeats imagined inhabiting Byzantium, compelled to reveal 'what is past, or passing, or to come.' Without fail, his poems give exquisite pleasure." -- Elizabeth Spires

Edition details

• Publisher: Louisiana State Univ Pr
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807123617
• ISBN 13: 9780807123614
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 99