Sparrow: New and Selected Poems (Southern Messenger Poets) - Softcover

As adduced by the three decades' worth of poetry represented here, the line that separates private concerns from social ones is easily erased. In poems that map the shifting interactions of lyric and narrative modes, former Triquarterly editor Gibbons combines an imagist's visual acuity ("The sunlight gathers the gold-green wall of trees/ in pleats") with a therapist's attention to gesture ("I saw him touch her shoulder/ carefully, as if it had thorns"). While earlier poems reveal the restraining influence of Ezra Pound and the Chinese masters, Gibbons's later work stretches into looser, more outward-looking forms as his lens widens beyond introspection to include the lives of others, often those haunted by loss ("City") or caught up in destructive relationships as a means toward identity and security ("Saints"). Though he sometimes finds himself "getting lost in the pity of it" and allows for some windy passages, Gibbons's honesty of expression and involvement in his subjects prove that at least someone hears the difficult, almost inexpressible stories that would otherwise dissolve in silence.?Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, N.Y.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Gibbons places the narrators of his exquisitely tender poems firmly in their imagined worlds, then leaps into the realm of pure emotion. An empathic and arresting storyteller, Gibbons creates drama with just an eyeful of perfectly balanced lines, exploring the extremes of love--be it that of a son for his father, a father for his daughter, or the confoundin g bond between men and women--with coiled energy. Street scenes and domesti c conflicts engage him as much as trees in winter or the flight of a bird, which, in the title poem, Gibbons wishes he could witness simply for its own sake, rather than subject it to his habitual "symbolic thinking." But it is that very trait that infuses his poems with their profound and affecting tension. As Gibbons writes about a man remembering his dead, asurprise kiss, a woman's rage against a violent lover, he seems to be pressing against his printed words like a visitor reaching between the bar s of a jail cell to touch a loved one, with sorrow, longing, and conviction. -- Donna Seaman, Booklist