THREE POEMS by Reginald Gibbons

The three poems that comprise Reginald Gibbons’ new book, Three Poems, cover an enormous ground of personal and public history and an extraordinary variety of poetic styles, forms and conventions ranging from a poignantly ambivalent, meditative reckoning with the vexed and thwarted life of the poet’s mother, to a hilarious yet infuriated syllabic rant to the mother tongue about Donald Trump—the great linguistic as well as moral/political degrader/grifter of this terrifying moment of American history—and finally a memoir-like elegiac series of heart-wrenching glosses Gibbons weaves through a volume of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, about an old friend of the poet’s and the political hopes and literary aspirations they once shared. This is a rich, wild, gorgeously surprising volume from one of our very best and most accomplished poets whose poems are more inventive, unpredictable and urgent than ever before.

–Alan Shapiro, William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3520

Reginald Gibbons’s Three Poems is a book of great themes greatly realized: the vexed relations between mother and child; the dynamics of memory; love’s tender inflexions; anger’s tenacity; the dire instabilities built into our democracy and the poisonous presence of Donald Trump and his kind. Gibbons, one of our finest poets, meets his themes with righteous inquisitiveness, wit, and fury.

–W. S. Di Piero

As the Enlightenment seemingly burns to ashes before our eyes, how remarkable to come across the deep, learned lucidity of this book. Three poems, three elegies: one for a mother, one for the republic, and one in memory of a shared past built upon books and hope and commitment to moral virtues, which is to say an elegy for youth itself. Combining memoir, eulogy and diatribe, THREE POEMS reminds us again of Reginald Gibbons’ intellectual distinction and poetic mastery.

–Campbell McGrath

In Three Poems, Reg Gibbons gives us a trio of intense experiences. In the first, an adult son reckons with the losses and disappointments that made his mother the woman she was, above and beyond her maternal role; while in the second, a highly energetic cascade of quatrains addresses a different mother, the English language, his “mother tongue.” In the third, an elegy that defies easy categorization, Gibbons mourns a complicated friendship forged in shared love of poetry, by inventively intertwining his memories with chance lines from the specific copy of Pound’s Cantos that passed between the two men. This work stays with you, haunting.

–Evie Shockley