Out in the Open: Poems - Softcover

Gibson, Margaret

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807115193 ISBN 13: 9780807115190

Publisher: LSU Press, 1989

Synopsis

The lyric and meditative poems Margaret Gibson gives us in Out in the Open are works of contemplation and self-inquiry. “In the long journey to be other than I am / I have struggled and not got far,” she writes. Sometimes the journey takes the poet literally out in the open―the mountains, the desert, the fields, the wood. At other times, the journey, the search for vision and for truth, begins a moment’s notice in more familiar, domestic surroundings.

I lift the glass
turn it slowly in the light,
its whole body full of light.
Suddenly I hold everything
I know, myself most of all,
in question.

Waiting for a grasp of permanent unity and clarity, the poet turns the act of waiting into a discipline that enables the obstructions encountered (desire, fear, ambition, death, disharmony) to become teachers. “Meeting others we meet ourselves,” one poem says, and whether the other is a love, or someone dying, a former Nazi pilot, or a blind woman in Zagorsk, there is self-meeting and, sometimes, a deep recognition of something beyond, and yet within, self.

At the core of what I am,
in that sacred space, light
does its work, as it will
without my consent
or blessing―and better so.

Echoes of Taoist, Buddhist, and Christian thinking haunt the mind in these poems, although the vision arrived at in the last poems is syncretic, an existential clarity in which struggle of wills is momentarily stilled.

The wind breathes light
into our bones―turning stars
into power we can touch, impluse
we can follow of tell, teaching love―
for that is what we are.

About this title

About the Author

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.

Reviews

In her fourth collection, award-winning poet Gibson ( The Daybooks of Tina Modotti ) seeks "small clarities, hard won" in nature, whose "fresh syllables" serve as models for her own poetic language. Wishing to possess a "beginner's mind" able to perceive things afresh, and writing as one who feels "properly alone" in forest or meadow, Gibson lyrically explores a peaceable kingdom that reveals to her the "singular solace / of being equivalent and simple." Among her subjects are the humble lemon (admirably "sleek and visible") and garlic, whose potency seems miraculous. Peppers render the poet "plural, / polymorphous, perverse," extending her own being by their example. For Gibson, poetry, like nature, is purifying. Yet as a public record of private experience, her work communicates a longing for natural simplicity more convincingly than its fulfillment.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Publication date: 1989
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807115193
• ISBN 13: 9780807115190
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 55