Inhoudsopgave:
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From Ritual  A slow parade of old west enthusiasts, camp song and hymn, came in along the winding  way where rural declined to suburban, slow riders and wagoners passing a cow staked  to graze, some penned cattle looking vacantly upânot in vacant lots the ancient icons  of wealth they had been in odes, prayers and epics, in sacrifices and customs of bride-price  or dowry. (Itâs good people no longer make blood sacrifices, at gas stations and stores,  for example, and in the crunching gravel parking lots of small churchesâoh but we do.) âThe evening forgives the alleyway,â Reginald Gibbons writes in his tenth book of poemsâbut such startling simplicities are overwhelmed in us by the everyday and the epochal. Across the great range of Gibbonsâs emblematic, vividly presented scenes, his language looks hard at and into experience and feeling. Words themselves have ideas, and have eyesâinwardly looking down through their own meanings, as the poet considers a lake in the Canadian north, a Chicago neighborhood, a horse caravan in Texas, a church choir, a bookshelf, or an archeological dig on the steppes near the Volga River. The last lake is the place of both awe and elegy. |
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