It's Time: Poems

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.

Reginald Gibbons is the author of numerous works of poetry, fiction, and translation, including Sparrow: New and Selected Poems and the novel Sweetbitter, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. For his verse he has received the Carl Sandburg Award, the John Masefield Award, and the Balcones Poetry Prize. A native of Texas, Gibbons was editor of TriQuarterly magazine from 1981 to 1997. He lives in Evanston, Illinois, where he is a professor of English at Northwestern University.