It's time : poems / Reginald Gibbons

"I begin a walking tour of the broad fallen kingdom of thought:/ There, horses graze and gorse blazes,/ Money argues, dogs darken, bogs bark, warps woof." Gibbons writes poems full of meticulously detailed descriptions and heady thoughts and understandings, poems that consider all manner of things: the migration of birds, the vast variety of hats, and, in a nearly 200-line work called "Poem Including History" that serves as the volume's centerpiece, Europe itself ("swords, gods, kings, and verbs"). What begs notice in these poems, though, is Gibbons's wonderful awareness of language. Instead of dragging out a thesaurus to find words that stun and arrest, he uncovers the real talk of Americans, the rich weave of common speech, and puts it together with a smart and knowing eye and ear: "There is a word for the/ color of the clear sky/ but none for the falling-away-/ upward depth of it/ that feels to spanning and/ speeding from us/ for us ever to have called/ into it in time."