It's Time: Poems - Softcover

Reginald Gibbons is the author of numerous works of poetry, fiction, and translation, including Sparrow: New and Selected Poems and the novel Sweetbitter, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. For his verse he has received the Carl Sandburg Award, the John Masefield Award, and the Balcones Poetry Prize. A native of Texas, Gibbons was editor of TriQuarterly magazine from 1981 to 1997. He lives in Evanston, Illinois, where he is a professor of English at Northwestern University.

"I begin a walking tour of the broad fallen kingdom of thought:/ There, horses graze and gorse blazes,/ Money argues, dogs darken, bogs bark, warps woof." Gibbons writes poems full of meticulously detailed descriptions and heady thoughts and understandings poems that consider all manner of things: the migration of birds, the vast variety of hats, and, in a nearly 200-line work called "Poem Including History" that serves as the volume's centerpiece, Europe itself ("swords, gods, kings, and verbs"). What begs notice in these poems, though, is Gibbons's wonderful awareness of language. Instead of dragging out a thesaurus to find words that stun and arrest, he uncovers the real talk of Americans, the rich weave of common speech, and puts it together with a smart and knowing eye and ear: "There is a word for the/ color of the clear sky/ but none for the falling-away-/ upward depth of it/ that feels to spanning and/ speeding from us/ for us ever to have called/ into it in time." Too many of today's poets lose themselves in the story and forget the craft, ignoring Coleridge's maxim: "the right words in the right order." Gibbons forgets nothing, here reminding us that words can sing, evoke feelings, and fly smartly, amazingly, wonderfully. Highly recommended. Louis McKee, Painted Bride Arts Ctr., Philadelphia
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