Glass Globe - by Margaret Gibson (Paperback)

About the Book

"For over 40 years, Margaret Gibson's poetry has explored intimate human relationships in the natural and social worlds we inhabit. In her thirteenth volume of poems, Gibson continues to see herself and her world with clarity and awareness, but now with perhaps greater urgency. These poems grieve deeply, even as they warn and celebrate, with elegies for the beloved and elegies for the earth during the impending global crisis wrought by climate change. "The Glass Globe" begins with a moving poem which recounts washing the beloved's body just after death, and it concludes with a poem that "washes" the body of the earth, "this only, and only once, for once and for all / earth, as if it were a lover who has died." The book follows a dialectic pattern: the first section of open-hearted personal loss and lament moves to a second section of poems that explore environmental crisis, followed by a third section in which the vastness of climatic catastrophe and the intimacy of personal bereavement merge and reflect each other"--

Book Synopsis

Winner of the Connecticut Book Award for Poetry

With The Glass Globe, celebrated poet Margaret Gibson completes a trilogy distinguished by its meditative focus on the author's experience of her late husband's Alzheimer's disease. In this new collection, she blends elegies of personal bereavement with elegies for the earth during the ongoing global crisis wrought by climate change. Gibson's poems personalize the vastness of climate catastrophe while simultaneously enlarging personal grief beyond the limits of self-absorption. A work of great compassion and vision, The Glass Globe is a necessary, heartbreaking book from one of our most compelling poets.

Review Quotes

"And last we washed his body," is the startling first line in this extraordinary latest collection by Margaret Gibson, calling us to attend upon a series of the most unsparingly truthful, physically and emotionally laden poems-as-meditations I've ever read. Gibson's imaginative reach is intimate and wide-ranging, fusing personal grief and the natural, endangered world. The Glass Globe may be a world unto itself, an extended elegy created by language that is lyrical and philosophical in the deepest sense--but thanks to Gibson's empathetic and generous imagination, it is also our world, human and earthbound.-- "Eamon Grennan"

Every once in a great while, a book permanently enlarges my understanding of human consciousness. These poems embody everything I look for when I read: clarity, passion, fearlessness, depth of feeling, and absolute honesty. Their language is essential, by which I mean there is no gratuitous imagery, zero linguistic showing-off. Every word is necessary. Because the poems are born out of grief, in this case personal and environmental, their many joys carry weight that both deepens and heightens them. The Glass Globe is a brilliant book.-- "Chase Twichell"

The steady pulse audible throughout this collection is grief, but it's a grief tempered by recurrent redemptive moments born of rapt attention and also by the gifts of memory. Gibson's wisdom and strength are evident in these poems. A sharp-eyed observer, open to awe and wonder, she asks "to be that place where inner and outer meet." Over and over, the tough and tender poems in The Glass Globe take us to that place.-- "Rachel Hadas"

This is an elegiac collection, yes. But The Glass Globe shows us where loss can lead: there are astonishing poems here on the nature of nature, on the revelatory labor of gardening, and on the Jungian shadow of our age, climate change. Throughout, the movements of the poet's mind are so nimble, the language and form, so elegant, that each poem seems both integral and spacious, like "breath shaped and released/given freely into the clear light." I do not know of a poet who has written more beautifully of what it means to deeply know, and then lose, a beloved--whether a person or "this one earth, this only." Like all powerful literature, The Glass Globe is a book for all time, but particularly, our own.-- "Clare Rossini"

About the Author

Margaret Gibson, the poet laureate of Connecticut from 2019 to 2022, is the author of thirteen books of poems, including The Vigil, a finalist for the National Book Award. She has received grants from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets. Her awards include the Lamont Selection, the Melville Kane Award, and the Connecticut Book Award. She is the editor of Waking Up to the Earth: Connecticut Poets in a Time of Global Climate Crisis.