| 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 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.
I was drawn to it perhaps because of its color,
mysterious as the Old Russian cry to God, gospodi.
I did not bow to it.
My spine straightened
as I stood quietly there to study its architectural trinities,petals that opened down as if to touch damp earth, three
that lifted skyward, close enough
to make a tent,
a sanctuary
within which three more, lavender and yellow, hovered over the pistil, white and still. I remembered the door in my old dream,
beyond which, I once thought, the riddle of birth and death
lay revealed.
The door was white. It was shining. It was shut—
but no. It wasn't shut. It wasn't even a door. It was the light of a single eye. Whatever I look at, it looks back. From "Iris" published in One Bodyby Margaret Gibson.
Copyright © 2007 by Margaret Gibson. All rights reserved.
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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