cover image It's Time: Poems

It's Time: Poems

Reginald Gibbons. Louisiana State University Press, $26.95 (72pp) ISBN 978-0-8071-2814-5

Long admired as the editor of TriQuarterly, novelist and translator Reginald Gibbons (Sparrow: New and Selected Poems) returns with his seventh book of poems, It's Time. Gibbons offers impressive range and ambition in works ""sometimes small but as/ Weighty as the world."" Several risky poems of metaphysical and moral statement may please admirers of the late Robert Penn Warren. Other standouts include an appalled, compressed narrative ""Poem Including History""; a prose-poem sequence on ancient birds and modern political protests; a fragmentary dramatic monologue, ""Stop"" (""Remember the time you hid under my bed and you said"" constitutes one abandoned reverie); and a pleasingly retrograde, Yeatsian stanzaic poem about swans.