Last Lake, Reginald Gibbons’s tenth book of poems, portrays human actions against the background of long spans of time. We hear the voices of gabbers, singers, lovers, and ghosts from diverse ends of the earth: veterans and victims of wars from ancient Greece and the ancient Central Asian steppes; soldiers from the Civil War, World War II, and Vietnam; militants in the Yosemite Valley and Texas; conservation activists from the vast lakes and rivers to our north; and, finally, our own fraught and noisy Chicago. In the course of these long narrative poems written in virtuoso lines and stanzas, characters step out of the continuum of human experience and sidle up to us, some even from realms accessible only in the imagination, to bridge the universal and abstract with personal, everyday tragedy and experience. The long poem, which occupies the second half of the book, enlarges the scope of American poetry by incorporating poetic effects and features into English more often found in Russian poetry. Last Lake represents some of the best writing of a long, distinguished career in poetry and is a fine, innovative addition to Phoenix Poets.
From Ritual
A slow parade of old west enthusiasts,
camp song and hymn, came in along the winding
way where rural declined to suburban, slow
riders and wagoners passing a cow staked
to graze, some penned cattle looking vacantly
up—not in vacant lots the ancient icons
of wealth they had been in odes, prayers and epics,
in sacrifices and customs of bride-price
or dowry. (It’s good people no longer make
blood sacrifices, at gas stations and stores,
for example, and in the crunching gravel
parking lots of small churches—oh but we do.)
In his tenth book of poems, Reginald Gibbons immerses the reader in many different places and moments of intensity, including a lake in the Canadian north, a neighborhood in Chicago, the poet Osip Mandelshtam’s midnight of social cataclysm and imagination, a horse caravan in Texas, and an archeological dig on the steppes near the Volga River.Last Lake begins with a cougar and ends with bees; it speaks in two ways—with reminiscence, meditation, and memorial, and with springing leaps of image and thought.
Lisainfo e-raamatute kohta