Description
The precision, originality, and playfulness of Robert Gibbs' poems have captivated readers for over half a century. Mixing the cerebral and the heartfelt, Gibbs' poems investigate and celebrate family, history, and nature with decisive imagery, idiomatic immediacy, punning wordplay, and breadth of imagination.
About the author
Robert Gibbs was born in Saint John, New Brunswick in 1930. He joined the Bliss Carman Society at the University of New Brunswick in the late 1940s where he was mentored by Don Gammon, Elizabeth Brewster, Fred Cogswell, and Alfred Bailey, the founder of The Fiddlehead magazine. Gibbs's poetry started to appear in this publication in 1949.
In his more than twenty-five years of teaching at UNB, Gibbs taught general undergraduate and Canadian literature courses and was the director of UNB's creative writing graduate program. He served as both editor and poetry editor of The Fiddlehead. Upon his retirement from UNB in 1989, he was named Professor Emeritus.
Gibbs was the keynote speaker at the first Alden Nowlan Literary Festival, and the Festival two years later paid tribute to Gibbs. His body of work was further recognized in 1998 with New Brunswick's Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence in English-Language Literary Arts. He has been involved with the Maritime Writers' Workshop since its inception and continues to live and write in Fredericton.
Excerpt: The Essential Robert Gibbs (by (author) Robert Gibbs)
The Death of My Father
My father died Christmas Eve in
the middle of the night and
the green breath of the big tree
in our frontroom mixed with
the dark smell of death upstairs.
My mother called us in and said
'I think he's gone, your father's gone', and
seeing the slack black gape
of his mouth, I thought of the cold
bluebodied turkey in the fridge downstairs.
A praiseworthy man, on Sundays out to meeting
with praise of God in his eyes and not
a pigeon missed with breadcrumbs nor
a dickybird in the gutter and not
a tomcat passed with his ruff
unruffled or his rough purr unpurred.
A man simple enough, in love with sunsets
and butter-and-eggs by the railway tracks
where we took our Sunday walks around
the waterfronts and afterwards reformed
baptist hymns which his thick fingers pressed
from the thick strings of his cello.
I see you dad, on your high stool in
your shop, eyeglass wrenched into play and
fine curly gold turning up and off from
your keen engraver as you cut 'Love for
always and always' on the inside circus
of a secondhand wedding ring.
And how we hoarded the dust from
every sweeping in a tall black can and
shipped it away to the refiner to have
your gold and silver letters, all
your days' cuttings from coffin plates
and baby spoons, cradled out
in his white secret fire and
sent back, sent back.
Editorial Reviews
'In the modern world of cell phones, texting, and Twitter, ''Getting in touch with nature'' has become a cliche, something that sounds like the latest status update from one of several hundred Facebook friends. The Essential Robert Gibbs, the latest collection in The Porcupine's Quill Essentials series focusing on Canadian poets, helps to restore an emphasis on the natural world by seizing on the little details we often miss day to day.
'Influenced by the landscapes that surrounded him during his long teaching career at the University of New Brunswick, Gibbs wrote many wonderful poems, the best of which have been collected here. The Essential Robert Gibbs offers works from the beginning of Gibbs's writing career, through the productive 1970s, and on to its latter stages, with the final poems collected here dating to 2003.
'Gibbs's poetic innovations can be subtle but effective, such as the substitution of spacing for punctuation, as in this fragment ''From Verse Journal'', in which the narrator rises early and reflects on his lover's sleeping form: ''That grace that sleep / so well opposed to my waking / Iwithdraw from / stealthily and whisper / Wait wait a little / till I break this perfect egg''
'Other times, Gibbs puns and plays delightfully with his words, like a child creating novel combinations of food on a dinner plate. In the excerpt ''From A Dog in a Dream'', Gibbs describes a poet dying on a river: ''Words no longer words / divided him asunder / and left him to stink / like a split fish on a drying rack / a kipper / an unread herring''
'Gibbs is known as a Maritime poet – that is, a poet from one of the three Canadian Atlantic coast provinces, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and Gibbs's own New Brunswick. Sometimes the ''maritime'' influence is clear, but the bulk of Gibbs's poetry is viewed through the lens of the land, even when the main focus of a poem is less tangible. Interactions with other people, musings on various themes – all are filtered through this physical world mindset, as when Gibbs describes eating blueberries and ruminates on cranberry juice on his way to bigger and weightier subjects. The reader's response to the ongoing descriptions of wild mushrooms, birdcalls, and flowers will likely be the factor that makes The Essential Robert Gibbs merely a pleasant read, or ... well, essential.
'Despite his nimble wordplay, Gibbs's poetry does not aim to dazzle; it does not generally shout for attention but rather waits for the reader to adjust to its own pace and rhythm. It is a polite but potent sort of poetry – perhaps what an American reader might expect from a Canadian poet. For a patient reader of well-crafted poetry, The Essential Robert Gibbs opens up a rich world, right before our eyes and well worth exploring.'
ForeWord Reviews
?Boiling down Gibbs' oeuvre to the essentials was undoubtedly for Bartlett a difficult if not sometimes heartbreaking task. He is to be congratulated on succeeding in serving the reader a taste of the variety of the forms in which Gibbs wrote – ranging from rhyming couplets through narrative ballads to experimental free form as in the excerpts, “From A Dog in a Dream.??
The Fiddlehead
?The Essential Robert Gibbs brings together some of the finest, most thought-provoking works from the poet's career.?
The Daily Gleaner
?A prize-winning poet himself, Bartlett presents Gibbs as a metaphysical poet with earthy touches, with a ken for the dense, intense nature scrutiny of British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, and as one who is kin to U.S.-U.K. egghead T.S. Eliot and homeboy bard Alden Nowlan.?
The Chronicle Herald
