Passing Through Customs: New and Selected Poems

by Gibbons Ruark

Gibbons Ruark is a poetic naturalist, bending close to his subject to report with precision the complexity of beauty we overlook in our haste. A truly imaginative writer as well, however, Ruark gives back to us not merely mirrored documentation but reflections fully colored by his sight and his spirit; like water and sky, both subject and poet are illuminated in his poems.Passing Through Customs, a retrospective of thirty years' work, is arranged in clusters of image, feeling, and thought, like runs of a particular kind of music. The reader moves from two coastal poems, years apart on the calendar of the poet's career, to poems about family and friends, through shadows and solitudes of elegies, into sunlit homages to the saving grace of art. There are evocations of Ruark's beloved and strife-torn Ireland, others of Italy's bounty, portraits of now missed faces, and the abiding presence of his wife. This gallery of words, so strongly affecting, steadies and moves us at once.Passing Through Customs leads us into the reaches of Ruark's sensibility, certainly, but also through inherited forms and ceremonies enriching to us all.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1999

Reviews

[R.G. Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full disclosure: Gibbons Ruark was my first creative writing professor at the University of Delaware in the 80s.

If you are a traveler in the familiar country of elegy, Passing Through Customs is your perfect passport. Moving smoothly through the landscapes of North Carolina, Italy, and Ireland, Ruark blends pubs, wildflowers, and other local color in masterful poems that reveal a mind fully conscious of both its sensual and elegiac selves.