Robert Gibbons

Beyond Time: New and Selected Work 1977-2007 Robert Gibbons

This book is a collection of writing that attempts to transgress boundaries set up to limit poetic expression to formal undertakings. Discarding rhyme, iambic pentameter, and even in most cases the stanza, it¿s less experiment than thrust, need, & method based on turning the erotic charge of life into language. In keeping with these crucial contemporary Times, the work increasingly addresses the world of politics, encompassing as it does an empathy for that seen & unseen Other. The author, coming from a myriad of experiences in the working world: years in the classroom, the factory, the library, including Time at the National Gallery of Art in Washington integrates Time spent into the subjects of the texts, elevating observations to the level of Art. See Goya, see Rauschenberg, hear Bach & Coltrane, visit Paris, Portland, Glasgow, Watts. The reader is invited along, the audience is asked a great deal of, there is no easy reading here, but the price of difficulty is Beauty, as Olson liked to quote Aubrey Beardsley speaking on his deathbed to Yeats. The barriers broken here are shards of Time that one holds in hand, turns over in mind, and ponders for future use in Life.