Not Hearing the Wood Thrush

At once plainspoken and profoundly inventive, these poems have a quality of attention that is riveting. Gibson’s courage to look without preconception, and to resist straining after philosophical or poetic conclusions, makes her piercing awareness possible. ‘Not-knowing,’ said Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki, ‘is most intimate.’ Again and again, Gibson illuminates human sentience with subtle and surprising force. This is an important book, whose spare, vivid language rises out of the babel of contemporary American poetry like a star. ~Chase Twichell

One of Margaret Gibson’s epigraphs to her deep, lyrically gorgeous Not Hearing the Wood Thrush is ‘Let what comes, come; let what goes, go. Find out what remains.’ I can think of no recent book that so lives up to the wisdom of all three parts of that quote. But to say that it’s a spiritual love story that deals with her husband’s illness and death, and how she lives with it, is not to give her book its full due. It’s a book of lament and acceptance, a metaphysical exploration of what’s inescapable, a great book (I say with conviction) by one of our best poets. ~Stephen Dunn

What I’m especially struck by and love in Margaret Gibson’s new collection is how she manages to compose an authentic body-language for whatever we may think of as the soul. Few poets can be as passionately direct in feeling, in thought, and at the same time so discreet, so poised in expression. ‘What’s given/is quicksilver,’ she says, yet she catches all such quicksilver givens in the well-wrought net of her wide-awake language. Her poems allow us to be her well-nourished companions on a remarkable spiritual journey. ~Eamon Grennan