Animated Landscape by Robert Gibbons

Robert Gibbons (Salem, MA, 1946) is one of the great secrets of contemporary US poetry. Gibbons says that Animated Landscape is the collection he was destined to write. One hopes too that it’s the collection destined to reveal him to a wider circle of readers. It places him firmly in the tradition of modern US poetry, following Olson, Creeley and the Objectivists, and alongside some of the best contemporary Anglophone poets, like Jean Sprackland, and great poets writing today in Spanish, like Cristian Aliaga and Sergio Raimondi.

—Ben Bollig, Oxford University

“… And I’ve heard from Robert Gibbons about this & that – he’s a gallant man who lives within art/literature to an extent that I can’t even fathom. I’m reading Harold Bloom’s huge Genius, & Bob wd. find much to connect to.”

—William Heyen, National Book Award Finalist, excerpt from 2/22/16 Letter to Nine Point publisher Geoff Gronlund

Robert Gibbons’s new collection of poems lays bare the vast expanse of human history as a widening landscape of the most august imagination. Gibbons, a born maximalist, carries Charles Olson’s excavations into the present tense, but does so in his own measure of music, personal and specific, yet universal and inclusive. Animated Landscape never forgets history is not a then, but always now, always all around us.

—Richard Deming, Yale University

The Animated Landscape that is Robert Gibbons’ concern in these dazzling poems stretches from the Pleistocene to the present, from prehistoric images of human and animal presence to the work of contemporary painters, poets, and jazz musicians. If there is a poet in America possessed of a broader vision, I have not encountered him or her. Gibbons’ stereoscopic vision, which he has kept faith with across eighteen books, is nothing less than the quest for a metaphysics, centered on the experience of time, by which we might be restored to wholeness. He wants to acknowledge the “uncoiling scroll of brutal force, horned/ weapon, testeronic origin of energy, not syntax” as he writes of the prehistoric painting of a bull at Altimira. He is not content with mere emblems or images of the life-force; he wants to understand the ways that both the erotic and destructive issue in the present, in our own historical moment, in our lives.

—Richard Hoffman

Robert Gibbons is the author of nine books of poetry, numerous chapbooks, and a unique study of the affinities in approaches to art in language by Charles Olson and that of Clyfford Still in paint: Olson/Still: Crossroad. In 2006 he was awarded a John Anson Kittredge Fund grant to travel and read his work at the Poetry & Politics Conference at the University of Stirling, Scotland. There, he met Ben Bollig, now at Oxford, who recorded the meeting online writing that, “he is the most passionate advocate of poetry I have met.” National Book Award Finalist, William Heyen, calls Gibbons “one of the great writers of our time.” In 2013, after publishing his Trilogy of prose poems, This Time, Traveling Companion, and To Know Others, Various & Free, the poet was invited to give the Creative Keynote address, titled Kerouac & the Ecstatic Act of Writing, at the 2nd annual European Beat Studies Conference held at Aalborg University, Denmark. For the past 12 years he’s lived and worked in Portland, Maine. Former chairman of PEN New England, Richard Hoffman, wrote, “Gibbons is in the process of sacralizing Portland, lodging it in the imagination of readers, as Williams did for Paterson, Cafavy for Alexandria, Joyce for Dublin.”

Book Information:

· Paperback: 144 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-257-0

$16

Animated Landscape by Rober… by Geoffrey Gatza