Tikkun Magazine, November/December 2008
REVIEW
Odes and Conversations
By David Danoff
Creatures of a Day, by Reginald Gibbons
Reginald Gibbons is a poet who does not turn away. He is not blind to the suffering of the world, and he is not deaf to the voices all around him. The physical details of the world, the stories of the people he passes, the weight of both memory and history behind him—all this he absorbs in his poems, transforming the flotsam of passing lives and suffering into a series of quiet and tender emblems of enduring art.
Often, the poet plays the role of conversationalist, not unlike the old man described in the poem "Ode: At a twenty-four-hour gas station." The man sits up late in a dingy waiting area, observing the people who pass through and reaching out to make small connections through the sharing of stories.
The speaker of the poem is uneasy, out of his element. The physical details are captured with a squeamish precision: next door, the "chain restaurant that serves breakfast and inert heavy pie all day and night"; in the garage waiting room, the "beat-up conjoined seats transplanted from some failed theater" and the perpetually heated carafe of "thick cooked coffee."
In this place of unloveliness and manual labor, where young men come to make some money with their hands, the speaker thinks uneasily of his own bookish vocation. Assessing the Mexican garage mechanics, the Italian owners, and initially the garrulous old man too, he sees only difference: "not like me," he thinks, "not like me."
But a connection is made: The old man is a Polish Jew who came to Chicago years earlier to work in the garment industry; the speaker mentions his own half-Jewish heritage from Lodz. And the poem concludes that, in spite of the struggles in the world, and in spite of the material challenges each person must face, "in every moment there is some possibility that the last moment did not have, some other jalapeño or orchid or high heel, some other radiator repair, some other young man who has left home to find work."
Throughout the book, Gibbons displays this same concern with work and emigration, with the quotidian details that constitute a record of life, and with people telling their stories. Many poems center on observations of a single figure: a homeless woman in Chicago; a blind man in a bar; a bus-stop grifter with a grotesquely swollen hand; a onetime schoolmate of the poet's daughter, now reported dead due to suicide. Sometimes the figure is physically present, sometimes only in memory or imagination. Differences and divisions are tenuously bridged, Connections are continually made.
The book contains a series of "Odes," written in long, flowing, Walt Whit-manesque lines, which alternate with groups of sparer poems in which short lines measured syllabically are meshed across a central break, like the teeth of a zipper.
In the Odes, the conclusion of one line is often picked up by identical or echoing words at the start of the next, as in "Ode: I had been reading ancient Greeks":
In spring the snow-melt around where I lived sometimes used to raise
the water table so high that
That a backyard water-well like ours, sunk not very deeply into a
gentle limestone slope, became became temporarily a spring ...
The effect is of one thought running irresistibly into another, just as the scenes and lives described cannot be divided; each one picks up from the preceding, and none stands alone.
In the shorter poems, the disjointed line breaks correspond to the divisions so many of these pieces address. In every line as in every life, there comes the break, the dislocation. Viewed on the page, the overlapping lines seem to waver, as though threatening to pull apart in opposite directions. But they still form one braided column, one poem, and the voice of the poet weaves through them, suturing each gap.
Many of the most powerful pieces juxtapose Gibbons's personal memories and the stark, timeless themes of an inherited tradition. This is apparent in "My Herakleitos," an elegy for a fellow poet who shared Gibbons's interest in classical Greek. Gibbons echoes a poem by the fastidious, anti-heroic, Alexandrian poet and scholar Kalhmakhos, who in the fourth centuiy BCE declared to his friend Herakleitos:
"Your poems still sing—that plunderer,
"Death, will not get his hands on those."
But will this prove true? The poems of Gibbons's own friend, alas, were the sort which
praise neitherthe accomplices
of power northose who resist
it; your poems memorialize
no conquerors or rebels and
neither sort will
notice your poems.
How can such poems endure in the world, without interest or assistance from the powerful? What's more, the speaker sees his own quiet poems risking the same neglect, as he and his friend alike would both
labor at fine detail as
though with mouse-whisker
brushes, like
Persian painters long
forgotten—because
in this way we revive some-
thing old that we believe to
be always good.
The anxiety is real. No simple or sentimental answer can be offered. But the literary tradition, however improbably, with its long braid of accumulating contributions from artists in every age, somehow stretches like a bridge across the violence of armies, the upheavals of history, or the more insidious destructiveness of simple cultural forgetting. Gibbons asserts the value of a carefully made poem, as each poet's verses preserve and transmit to a subsequent listener at least a small fragment of the world before it's lost:
Kallimakhos
remembers his friend,
and you remembered
Kallimakhos, and
I remember you.
David Danoff is a student at the University of Maryland, inhere he is working toward his MFA in poetry.
Source Citation
Danoff, David. 2008. Odes and Conversations [Review of the book Creatures of a Day] Tikkun 23(6): 78.
