one hand
reaching for another and in the dark
you let your fingers unfold end over end
then close
The 216 poems in this collection would never be written except for the 216 photographs in the collection titled Deus Ex Machin by Ralph Gibson. -Simon Perchik
Simon Perchik, an attorney, was born 1923 in Paterson, NJ and educated at New York University (BA English, LLB Law). His poems have appeared in various literary journals including Partisan Review, Poetry, The Nation, and The New Yorker.
reviews:
"The Gibson Poems center around common themes and images to elicit both feelings of loss and devastation and a strong desire to experience life. This collection strips you bare, flooding you with raw emotion in the midst of a drought." - Ashly Cutis, The Green Light
"The Gibson Poems is a rich, allusive book that achieves its effects through images rather than narrative. It suggests rather than states its themes. To me, it suggests many eternal ones: the life cycle of birth, growth, sex, aging, death, rebirth; the changing seasons; love and loss; memory; dreams; the imagined afterlife. Other readers will find their own themes—and delights—in this beautiful book." - Tom Zimmerman, Big Windows Review
“Perchik’s poetry allows past and present, familiar and fantastic, banal and bombastic to co-exist with creative tension. Perchik dives deep into the unconscious in his poetry and emerges with much that is beautiful and strange.” Washington Review
“These are poems with fresh insights sticking out all over them and they ought to give pleasure to anyone whose mind is still open to new poetry.” X.J.Kennedy
"The "meaning" in these poems resembles a fugitive glimpsed only as he vanishes around a corner, reappearing only as he turns the next corner, about to vanish. But he always returns...Perchik is truly a master." Robert Kramer, American Book Review.
I’ve been an admirer of Perchik’s poetry for some time and all the work in this book bear the mark of his teasingly brilliant poems. They are poems that, in the best tradition of surreal poetry, defy reductionist interpretations while remaining suggestive of a rich diversity of meaning. These hint at love stories behind them, that “constant fear it’s her name/that falls from the night sky” or “the last drop falling through her arm/as a single word – Mickie! louder, louder/and you hold hands, go on drowning.” With the drowning, the earthquake and walls, the despair and falling that inflict these poems there is trauma and pain being confronted but confronted without sentimentality. It is a remaking and a reimagining of the reality of those despairs into art, a form of salvation and reanimation.
I’ve always loved the way Perchik’s poems transform from moment to moment through acceptable irrationalities as a doorbell “smelling your sweat,” or a bed sheet that becomes “the stream pouring from each stone fountain.” Each moment of reflection finds an adequate anchor in an enlarging image and which in turn yields another reflection and so on until the resolution finds itself in what one can only call an exaltation of pure imagination. - Michael T. Young, Triggerfish
