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. 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. 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. 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.
