Young Woman with a Cane - by Reginald Gibbons (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Young Woman with a Cane explores the social, cultural, and personal dimensions of feeling, experience, and thought. This new collection by Reginald Gibbons ranges from nature and ecological crises to human conflicts of migration, self-determination, ancient war, and the corruption of political mores. In language intensified by strong rhythms, figures, and bounteous vocabulary, the book presents short lyrics alongside satires, laments, and witness, with subjects moving from elk in the Dakotas to underlings supporting knavish power, from celebrating words as a kind of phonetic music to brief narratives of interaction and consciousness. Above all, Gibbons's poems fluently and inventively articulate both directness and nuance.

The long prose poem that gives the book its title and other pieces evoke the historical depths, echoes, and precedents of present-day life. Gradually the book provides energetic metaphorical and notional riffs on violence, on wars both past and recent and ongoing, as it satirizes the corrupted politics of our age. Yet it also presents tender, sometimes melancholic treatments of everyday life. With a panoply of poetic forms, marked throughout by a lively pleasure in the language and the lines, Gibbons conjures an extensive range of story and experience, feeling and thought.

Review Quotes

"Young Woman with a Cane brings man's manipulated world to the fore. Gibbons's poems call me to visit an empathic mind upon land that is both marveled and misused as the titular poem mulls, 'If only we could ask children now for future forgiveness.'"--CM Burroughs

"Gibbons is also an accomplished translator, and his gift in these original poems that move through time and cultures is to translate into the present the living energy that continues to flow from the past. It is an interplay that has become a hallmark of his mature style."--Stuart Dybek

"Make no mistake, Gibbons's grasp of form is masterful, and his intimate nod to a rich classical tradition well-earned and finely presented, but this is also a wildly experimental book that forces poetry to do things and to share insights into who we are nowhere else available in poetry."--Bruce Weigl

"Reginald Gibbons has always been a most transcendent writer, heartening us mightily through his acute perceptions and graceful ways of saying. His voice strengthens a reader's own sense of belonging on the earth."--Naomi Shihab Nye

"These poems, again and again, renew the soul in its attentiveness and gratitude."--Brooks Haxton

About the Author

Reginald Gibbons is the author of fourteen books of poems, including Creatures of a Day, a finalist for the National Book Award. He has also published volumes of fiction, essays, and translations. A native of Texas, he now lives in Evanston, Illinois, where he is the Frances Hooper Professor Emeritus in the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University.