Introduction and Table of Contents
 |
Margaret Gibson Coast Corn Mask The Harvest Living History Tim Seibles A Correspondence with Margaret Gibson |
| A link to Blackbird’s “Margaret Gibson Reading Loop” menu appears at the bottom of every page of related content. You may also return to this menu at any time by visiting Features. |
Poet Tim Seibles opens his review of Margaret Gibson’s The Glass Globe, her most recent book of poems, by noting:
Though Margaret Gibson’s The Glass Globe begins as an intimate meditation on the decline and loss of the author’s husband due to Alzheimer’s-related dementia, it develops into something much larger, perhaps an elegy for the earth itself.
Gibson titled her 1997 collection of new and selected poems Earth Elegy, so one is not mistaken to examine her work through the lens of her relationship to the world around us. For decades now, she has been asking us to take care for this world as well as to celebrate its uncountable presentations and its grace.
Gibson has been a generous contributor to Blackbird since our first issue, and we are grateful for the opportunity to publish a new batch of her poems and for the promise of her companionship in this moment and this time.
“I want to live in the spirit of strict / pleasure, / a form of generosity / that allows for an earthbound humanity,” she tells us in “Corn Mask,” and Gibson’s poetry has often, over time, even when faced with grief and loss, reminded us of our connections and of the myriad joys that living presents.
Joining Gibson’s new poems in this issue are Seibles’s review and a conversation with Gibson about this recent book conducted by Blackbird associate editor Waverley Vesely.
We invite you to savor Gibson’s work here and in her books and other projects—and also, as she instructs, to pay attention.
Paying attention can deepen into awareness, and with awareness, moment by moment, breath by breath, comes Being. Being is without boundaries, borders, frames, or scripts. Art—making it, responding to it—is a practice in which attention, imagination, playfulness, form and formlessness, speech and silence intermingle. But art without awareness, just as life itself without awareness, may as well be a husk.
