| Winner of the 2008 Connecticut Book Award in Poetry
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 section, 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 is the author of eight previous poetry collections, including Autumn Grasses; Icon and Evidence; Long Walks in the Afternoon; Memories of the Future: The Daybooks of Tina Modotti; the National Book Award finalist The Vigil: A Poem in Four Voices; and Earth Elegy: New and Selected Poems. She lives in Preston, Connecticut.
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