Reginald Gibbons: "Refuge"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Reginald Gibbons’s “Refuge,” which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2001 issue (Volume II, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

This week Reginald Gibbons was named one of the five finalists for the 2008 National Book Award in Poetry on the basis of his latest book of poems, Creatures of a Day (LSU Press, 2008). He has published eight poetry collections, including Sparrow: New and Selected Poems and Homage to Longshot O’Leary. He also has translated or co-translated books by various poets, including Selected Poems of Luis Cernuda and Sophocles, Selected Poems: Odes and Fragments. Gibbons has received numerous honors, such as Guggenheim and NEA fellowships in poetry. He is a columnist for American Poetry Review. Reginald Gibbons co-founded and edited TriQuarterly Books, and he teaches at Northwestern University.

About Creatures of a Day, LSU Press reports “Reginald Gibbons presents intense encounters with everyday people amidst the historical and social contexts of everyday life. His poems are meditations on memory, obligation, love, death, celebration, and sorrow. Some of them show how the making of poetry itself seems inextricably enmeshed with personal encounter and with history. This new collection includes five odes woven from interactions with others, thirteen shorter poems, and ‘Fern-Texts,’ a kind of biographical and autobiographical essay in syllabic verse on the parallel decades of the English 1790s and the American 1960s. Using quotations from the notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Fern-Texts’ interweaves the dilemmas of love, ethics, and political engagement in Coleridge’s life when he was in his twenties and in the poet’s own life when, at the same age, he lived in California.”

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an exceptional work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review with the recommendation that readers revisit it. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.