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Little Glass Planet: Poems

by Dobby Gibson
Graywolf. May 2019. 88p. ISBN 9781555978426. $16; ebk. ISBN 9781555978891. POETRY
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This fourth collection from Minnesota-based poet Gibson (It Becomes You), who has been awarded fellowships from the prestigious Lannan Foundation, among others, consists of two extended poetic sequences and more than two dozen lyrics. Gibson enacts and reproduces persistent feelings of disquiet and discontent; the condition of American culture and American politics worries and disgusts him. At times incantatory, at times enraged, Gibson's poetic voice has genuine flow and a mad logic all its own, offering many moments of breathtaking beauty: "Beneath our lives there are sordid undulations/ and embraces brief and sweet….like the sip of air inside us/ full of an old sea's grace."
VERDICT Idiosyncratic and memorable, Gibson's poetry will reward readers even through its moments of anguish: "If we belong to anything in the universe,/ it's to our own music."
Reviewed by Graham Christian, formerly with Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, MA , May 17, 2019
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