One Body: Poems

One Body is Margaret Gibson’s most intimate collection of poems to date. Written as if to honor the injunction “Work to simplify the heart,” the poems are direct, empathetic, and tender in their study of life and death. The thirteen poems of the opening sequence, as well as other poems throughout, look steadily at life and death until they are transparently “one body.” “Closer to death,” she writes, “I want great faith and great doubt.” Whether the focus is personal or social, Gibson has written the poems in this stunning collection “because I want to see / how the body goes still / how the mind, how the lens of the eye / magnifies to an emptiness / so deep, so flared wide / there is everywhere field and the Source / of field.” One Body is the work of a richly contemplative poet.

Margaret Gibson, the poet laureate of Connecticut from 2019 to 2022, is the author of fourteen collections of poems, including The Vigil, a finalist for the National Book Award. Her honors include the Lamont Poetry Selection, the Melville Kane Award, and two Connecticut Book Awards. She is the editor of Waking Up to the Earth: Connecticut Poets in a Time of Global Climate Crisis.