A remarkable literary voice, Reginald Gibbons has produced a selection of poems that exemplifies the unique combination of his own poetic vision and the scope of his restless, inquiring, passionate sensibility. Stamped with his signature blend of compassion and consciousness, Sparrow contains poems of love, sorrow, keen attentiveness, and a powerful range of feeling and thought. There is an ethical dimension in Gibbons’ poetry; it is rarely explicit, but it lies behind his dramas of conflict and choice, his meditations on feeling and place, and his experiments with form. Here we find the poet’s subtle exploration of how our thinking and feeling follow not only our individual experience, but also the limitless possibilities of language itself.Together we will plan our small resistances against large ordersAnd a small salvaging from great disorder,
And . . .
We will throw the bedclothes across the window sill into the cleansing cold of winter sun,
We will believe of the moon that it rose last night through the black up-reaching branches of the winter trees.
—from “St. Valentine’s Eve”
Reginald Gibbons is the author of four previous volumes of poetry, several works of criticism, a short story collection, and a novel, and served as editor of TriQuarterly from 1981 to 1997. A native of Texas, he now lives with his family in Evanston, Illinois, where he is a professor of English at Northwestern University.
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