Animated Landscape

by Robert Gibbons

Robert Gibbons (Salem, MA, 1946) is one of the great secrets of contemporary US poetry. Gibbons says that Animated Landscape is the collection he was destined to write. One hopes too that it’s the collection destined to reveal him to a wider circle of readers. It places him firmly in the tradition of modern US poetry, following Olson, Creeley and the Objectivists, and alongside some of the best contemporary Anglophone poets, like Jean Sprackland, and great poets writing today in Spanish, like Cristian Aliaga and Sergio Raimondi. —Ben Bollig, Professor of Spanish American Literature, Oxford University Robert Gibbons’s new collection of poems lays bare the vast expanse of human history as a widening landscape of the most august imagination. Gibbons, a born maximalist, carries Charles Olson’s excavations into the present tense, but does so in his own measure of music, personal and specific, yet universal and inclusive. Animated Landscape never forgets history is not a then, but always now, always all around us. —Richard Deming, Director of Creative Writing, Yale University The Animated Landscape that is Robert Gibbons' concern in these dazzling poems stretches from the Pleistocene to the present, from prehistoric images of human and animal presence to the work of contemporary painters, poets, and jazz musicians. If there is a poet in America possessed of a broader vision, I have not encountered him or her. Gibbons' stereoscopic vision, which he has kept faith with across eighteen books, is nothing less than the quest for a metaphysics, centered on the experience of time, by which we might be restored to wholeness. He wants to acknowledge the "uncoiling scroll of brutal force, horned/ weapon, testeronic origin of energy, not syntax" as he writes of the prehistoric painting of a bull at Altimira. He is not content with mere emblems or images of the life-force; he wants to understand the ways that both the erotic and destructive issue in the present, in our own historical moment, in our lives. —Richard Hoffman, former Chairman of PEN New England Animated Landscape is a revelation. Like Marsden Hartley with his painted mountains or John Marin with his written seas, Robert Gibbons, through the mastery of his own medium, reminds us that writing and painting (and sculpture and architecture and music) move in the same way, are part of the same topography, share the same substance, are the same thing. His passages carry us along many paths and lines of thought to the essential places where stone is stone, water is water, and art is art. All the while Gibbons kindly suggests, to borrow a favorite phrase from the polymath Guy Davenport, that the "geography of the imagination" is boundless. -Charles Brock, Associate Curator for American and British Paintings, National Gallery of Art In Robert Gibbons' new collection Animated Landscape there is much that brings the pleasure of familiarity to one who knows his previous the obsession with art in all its forms from cave paintings to abstract expressionism; the love of the flow and beat of music from Bach to Coltrane; the erudition that springs from his knowing literature, especially poetry, and the heritage of critical thinking that has travelled intertwined with literature for centuries. —Bent Sørensen, Associate Professor of English, Aalborg University, Denmark

146 pages, Paperback

Published August 12, 2016

About the author

Robert S. Gibbons is an American economist and Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management at MIT. He specializes in organizational economics and founded the NBER Working Group on Organizational Economics, which he directed from 2002 to 2022.