| "In the last few years Gibbons has written some of
the best poems in America,—big, rich, meticulous, thoughtful
canvases, social landscapes with personal and metaphysical
shadows. ‘Our hunger feeds on witness' he says, and
anyone who reads ‘I had been reading Ancient Greeks'
or ‘At a Twenty Four Hour Gas Station' will feel that
our world has been exposed and understood in ways free of
cliché. Creatures of a Day addresses ‘this
incomprehensible country' at our incomprehensible moment and
these brilliant and humble poems are as alive with consciousness,
as satisfying as anything I know."—Tony Hoagland
In Creatures of a Day, Reginald Gibbons presents intense
encounters with everyday people amidst the historical and
social contexts of everyday life. His poems are meditations
on memory, obligation, love, death, celebration, and sorrow.
Some of them show how the making of poetry itself seems inextricably
enmeshed with personal encounter and with history. This new
collection includes five odes woven from interactions with
others, thirteen shorter poems, and "Fern-Texts," a kind of
biographical and autobiographical essay in syllabic verse
on the parallel decades of the English 1790s and the American
1960s. Using quotations from the notebooks of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, "Fern-Texts" interweaves the dilemmas of love,
ethics, and political engagement in Coleridge's life when
he was in his twenties and in the poet's own life when, at
the same age, he lived in California.
Ranging from poems of witness to paradoxical speculations, from
the personal intimacy of love and death to the broad scope of historical
turmoil, Creatures of a Day is an unusual, powerful collection.
"In cold spring air"
In cold
spring air the
white wisp-
visible
breath of
a blackbird
singing–
we don't know
to un-
wrap these blind-
folds we
keep thinking
we are
seeing through
Reginald Gibbons is the author of seven previous
volumes of poetry, translations of Spanish and Mexican poetry and
ancient Greek tragedy, a short story collection, and a novel, and
he served as editor of TriQuarterly from 1981 to 1997. He
has won the O. B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship,
the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and other honors. A native of Texas,
he now lives in Evanston, Illinois, where he is a professor of English
and classics at Northwestern University.
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