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.

Gibbons’s short poems portray a sense of wonder at the extraordinary ordinariness of life and the seemingly infinite complexities of identity. With intense feeling, he explores a metaphysical and philosophical vertigo, and with a quickness of thought, he ponders human feeling, experience, and perception. His occasions span celebrations, elegies, and dramatic monologues. In longer poems he uses the ancient Greeks as a trope for the complicated survival and shaping influence of the past on our attitudes and acts today.

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

Selection from “Poem Including History” published in It’s Time by Reginald Gibbons. Copyright © 2002 by Reginald Gibbons. All rights reserved.