From Ritual A slow parade of old west enthusiasts, camp song and hymn, came in along the winding way where rural declined to suburban, slow riders and wagoners passing a cow staked to graze, some penned cattle looking vacantly up—not in vacant lots the ancient icons of wealth they had been in odes, prayers and epics, in sacrifices and customs of bride-price or dowry. (It’s good people no longer make blood sacrifices, at gas stations and stores, for example, and in the crunching gravel parking lots of small churches—oh but we do.) “The evening forgives the alleyway,” Reginald Gibbons writes in his tenth book of poems—but such startling simplicities are overwhelmed in us by the everyday and the epochal. Across the great range of Gibbons’s emblematic, vividly presented scenes, his language looks hard at and into experience and feeling. Words themselves have ideas, and have eyes—inwardly looking down through their own meanings, as the poet considers a lake in the Canadian north, a Chicago neighborhood, a horse caravan in Texas, a church choir, a bookshelf, or an archeological dig on the steppes near the Volga River. The last lake is the place of both awe and elegy.
