Creatures of a Day by Reginald Gibbons

LSU Press 2008

Reviewed by Hansa Bergwall

To Know It

In this collection’s first poem, “Ode: Citizens,” Reginald Gibbons narrates an encounter that previews one of his recurring themes: guilt. An old homeless woman pushes her shopping cart full of possessions across the sidewalk. She looks at him.  He thinks about speaking to her and then doesn't. It occurs to Gibbons that she may be the same age as his mother:

... I feel guilty- her existence is knowable but willfully not
known by people like me- yet this is not an aunt of whom I never
knew, nor is it Mother herself as I never knew her,

As I needed to know her, or rather as I needed her to be,

To be knowable to me emotionally,

To be capable of knowing me,

This is an old woman I don't know who could use twenty dollars
          and a different life,

A different history

The admission of guilt forms the prism that bends Gibbons’s poetry. A person becomes a worthy subject because he asks him for bus fare or passes time drinking stale coffee at an auto body shop. Peculiarity and poverty walk with Gibbons’s guilt and moralizing through this book. He gets abstract quickly; “To be knowable to me emotionally” is a very weighty construction.  Nods to academic schools of thought make the longtime professor professorial as well. In “Ode: I had been reading ancient Greeks,” he writes,

Wonder: philosophy and poetry flowing like a kind of water down river
          Courses of human

Human experience, which changes over time , so thinking and feeling
          change too, the way water of some endless river that will never reach
          any sea passes through narrow rocky rapids

Rapids but also smooth broad channels, running heroically or angrily, or
          peacefully or somehow horribly...

Heraclitus’s philosophy of unending flux was more poetically described by the philosopher himself when he said that you can never step into the same river twice. Gibbons borrows this well-worn metaphor for time and belabors it into a recognizable cliché.

Reginald Gibbons does know what excellent poetry can do. In “Fern Texts, Autobiographical Essay on the Notebooks of Young Samuel Taylor Coleridge” he writes,

                            ... the poem needs a
conviction of uniqueness
                             and a tone of voice as if
whispering praise and sorrow,
                             Language attuned to spicules
sepals and scars, to surprise
                             that pleasingly confounds ex-
pectation, and attentive-
                             ness that at least sometimes thrills
to the strange, the sublimely
                             peculiar and to the im-
ponderable and the un-
                             conscious-

It is an excellent description of poetry worth reading. I wish more of this book pleasingly confounded me with the sublimely peculiar. That would be great.

And yet there are a few moments of verse as alive as his description. Here is one, also from “Fern Texts,”

So perhaps you displaced real
                                 suffering and clamor of
the thick  human crowd onto
                                 the appealing green fronds that
need no literacy nor
                                 franchise—this is the image
before your mind's eye—lovely
                                 “Fern... scattered thick but growing
single”; and still they grow in
                                 our unavoidable self-
conscious self-dividedness,
                                 our heritages at odds,
our paper trails and trials of
                                 spills and slips, they are growing
in our back seats and wet shoes…

--Oct. 15, 2008