It’s Time: Poems

In his seventh book of verse Reginald Gibbons ponders human consciousness and memory the blessedness of human love and the force and fury of human destructiveness. By turns intimate imaginatively historical and deeply engaged in the paradoxes of language itself, It’s Time belongs to that genealogy of poetry that registers ideas as much as it does feelings. From free verse to subtle regularities of metrical or syllabic verse from discursive arguments to surreal images. Gibbons’s technical range is startling. The poems he collects in It’s Time are profoundly thought through, immensely moving and entirely indispensable. I praise the gesture of a generous hand that smooths unequal wrongs into an equal peace that would turn the cost of a military aileron into ivy and guitar strings and terraces of rice. I praise the kiss, the bowing, the word, that mark an instant of human time defined by loving. I celebrate your reluctance to think of harm. Praise the thought, the reasoning, the prayer, too, and the tragic play that portrays the destroyer and does not destroy - from Poem Including History