New poetry by Dobby Gibson, author of Polar, which "teems with a language so alive and so imaginative that one cannot help but read on with wonder and rapture" (The Bloomsbury Review)
We have to escape while we can.
I'm trying to remember you―quick,
now you try to remember me.
―from "Refuge"
With sheer wit and keen observation, Dobby Gibson's Skirmish puts into conflict the private and public self, civil disobedience and civic engagement, fortunes told and fortunes made. These poems imaginatively, sometimes manically, move from perception to perception with the speed of a mind forced moment by moment to make sense of distant war and local unrest, global misjudgment and suspicious next-door neighbors, the splice-cuts of the media and the gliding leaves on the Mississippi River.
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Dobby Gibson is the author of the poetry collection Polar, which won the Beatrice Hawley Award. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
A noirish current runs through Gibson's second collection, which finds fascination in dark, abandoned urban or suburban spaces and unsolvable everyday mysteries: There's a street beneath this street, a city beneath this city,/ inhabited by empty tunnels/ built for trains that never arrived. These mostly short, free verse poems hum with gloomy humor and the mood of pregnant anticipation one finds in a Paul Auster novel. Gibson (Polar) is no escapist, though, portraying an anxious America in the new millennium. A palpable sense of paranoia is figured as spies who crop up in several poems. The sense of alienation pervades not just the public but also the domestic sphere (Soon I realized: they weren't actors,/ they were my family). Gibson also tries the fable, where he finds a comfortable home for his brand of black humor: There was once a roofer who lived/ a full life even though a stake/ had been driven through his forehead. Gibson mixes the language of public discourse, science, TV and everyday conversation in a chatty if bleak voice that is both accessible and satisfyingly challenging. (Jan.)
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