It's Time: Poems - Hardcover

Gibbons, Reginald

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807128147 ISBN 13: 9780807128145

Publisher: Louisiana State Univ Pr, 2002

Synopsis

In his seventh book of verse, Reginald Gibbons ponders human consciousness and memory, the blessedness of human love, and the force and fury of human destructiveness. By turns intimate, imaginatively historical, and deeply engaged in the paradoxes of language itself, IT'S TIME belongs to that genealogy of poetry that registers ideas as much as it does feelings. From free verse to subtle regularities of metrical or syllabic verse, from discursive arguments to surreal images, Gibbons's technical range is startling. The poems he collects in IT'S TIME are profoundly thought through, immensely moving, and entirely indispensable.

About this title

About the Author

Reginald Gibbons is the author of numerous works of poetry, fiction, and translation, including SPARROW: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS and the novel SWEETBITTER. For his verse he has received the Carl Sandburg Award, the John Masefield Award, and the Balcones Poetry Prize. A native of Texas, he lives in Evanston, Illinois, where he is a professor of English at Northwestern University.

Reviews

Long admired as the editor of TriQuarterly, novelist and translator Reginald Gibbons (Sparrow: New and Selected Poems) returns with his seventh book of poems, It's Time. Gibbons offers impressive range and ambition in works "sometimes small but as/ Weighty as the world." Several risky poems of metaphysical and moral statement may please admirers of the late Robert Penn Warren. Other standouts include an appalled, compressed narrative "Poem Including History"; a prose-poem sequence on ancient birds and modern political protests; a fragmentary dramatic monologue, "Stop" ("Remember the time you hid under my bed and you said" constitutes one abandoned reverie); and a pleasingly retrograde, Yeatsian stanzaic poem about swans.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

If the thoughtful poems in Gibbons' elegant seventh collection were pieces of music, they would be measured piano sonatas, each note, each word, carefully struck, precisely enunciated. Time is the book's ruling force, and Gibbons considers its passing on a grand scale with striking visions of nature's long epic as written in constellations, glaciers, and trees. But he also keeps the beat of daily life with unexpected parallels and crisp word patterns that snap back and forth with metronomic exactitude. Swinging neatly between the cosmic and the human, Gibbons documents nature under siege as migrating birds slam into large buildings and landfills cover once sacred lands, and ponders the burgeoning story we call history, a narrative that erases more lives than it remembers. The only power we can summon in defense of nature and against time's dragnet is language, and Gibbons is passionate in his love for its amber and gold. The way it preserves tales of gods, heroes, and fools; families loving and malevolent. The way it both holds warmth and reflects light. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

"I begin a walking tour of the broad fallen kingdom of thought:/ There, horses graze and gorse blazes,/ Money argues, dogs darken, bogs bark, warps woof." Gibbons writes poems full of meticulously detailed descriptions and heady thoughts and understandings poems that consider all manner of things: the migration of birds, the vast variety of hats, and, in a nearly 200-line work called "Poem Including History" that serves as the volume's centerpiece, Europe itself ("swords, gods, kings, and verbs"). What begs notice in these poems, though, is Gibbons's wonderful awareness of language. Instead of dragging out a thesaurus to find words that stun and arrest, he uncovers the real talk of Americans, the rich weave of common speech, and puts it together with a smart and knowing eye and ear: "There is a word for the/ color of the clear sky/ but none for the falling-away-/ upward depth of it/ that feels to spanning and/ speeding from us/ for us ever to have called/ into it in time." Too many of today's poets lose themselves in the story and forget the craft, ignoring Coleridge's maxim: "the right words in the right order." Gibbons forgets nothing, here reminding us that words can sing, evoke feelings, and fly smartly, amazingly, wonderfully. Highly recommended. Louis McKee, Painted Bride Arts Ctr., Philadelphia
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Louisiana State Univ Pr
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807128147
• ISBN 13: 9780807128145
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 72