It's Time: Poems

by Reginald Gibbons

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 at 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.

64 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2002

About the author

Reginald Gibbons is an American poet, fiction writer, translator, and literary critic. He is the Frances Hooper Professor of Arts and Humanities, Emeritus, at Northwestern University. Gibbons has published numerous books, including 11 volumes of poems, translations of poetry from ancient Greek, Spanish, and co-translations from Russian. He has published short stories, essays, reviews and art in journals and magazines, has held Guggenheim Foundation and NEA fellowships in poetry and a research fellowship from the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington D.C. For his novel, Sweetbitter, he won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; for his book of poems, Maybe It Was So, he won the Carl Sandburg Prize. He has won the Folger Shakespeare Library's O. B. Hardison, Jr. Poetry Prize, and other honors, among them the inclusion of his work in Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. His book Creatures of a Day was a Finalist for the 2008 National Book Award for poetry. His other poetry books include Sparrow: New and Selected Poems (Balcones Prize), Last Lake and Renditions, his eleventh book of poems. Two books of poems are forthcoming: Three Poems in 2024 and Young Woman With a Cane in 2025. He has also published two collections of very short fiction, Five Pears or Peaches and An Orchard in the Street.

Reviews

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

While each of the poems swells with a purpose, like for instance "Refuge" celebrating the independence of a wildflower, my frustration with this book is the confined endings. It's almost as though Gibbons doesn't trust his reader to put all the pieces together, or he has to go out with one of those very grand gestures that seems to crush the poem under its overweening intentions.