With Icon and Evidence, Margaret Gibson
gives us poems grounded in reverence and inquiry and sensuous delight.
She extends and enriches the lyric poem, finding it capacious and
durable enough to embrace short and longer meditations, epistles,
persona poems, and narratives. Whether their concerns are intimate,
spiritual, or social, these are poems of atonement essentially faithful
to experience and its revelations, more so than to any specific creed
or doctrine. The task to be faithful is both aesthetic and spiritual;
to use words faithfully is how Gibson clarifies her encounters with
the Absolute within the relative and mutable things of this world.
The opening poem situates the poet beneath an
endless sky of stars and dark emptiness: "But dear God, all I want
is to be here, / my tiny anguish and my joy / a moment's notice, an
equivalent cry." The book divides into four sections: Canticle, Complaint,
Confession, and Compline. Like the Psalms, the poems praise with one
voice, then turn to note human failure, error, and injustice. They
contemplate the ways of desire, then enter "the mission of solitude,"
turning from social practice to meditative practice, "summoned / by
pain and darkness by an intrepid joy."
Traditionally, one who makes an icon does so in
an attitude of contemplation, the finished icon uniting image and
spirit in a presence that challenges and confronts the one who stands
before it. Evidence has the force of both data and document,
but it also includes "the evidence of things not seen." In this rich
and powerful collection, Gibson uses both icon and evidence to probe
the human heart-its entanglements and its freedom.
Praise for the book:
"Icon and Evidence strikes me as Margaret
Gibson's most adventurous collection since Memories of the Future:
The Daybooks of Tina Modotti. Many of the poems have an energetic
intensity, a verbal acrobacy, that seems to me new in her work, yet
not at all 'adopted' or otherwise untrue to her primary impulses.
This is a beautiful, ambitious book."-Henry Taylor
"Though never shirking their necessary engagement
with the darker truths, Margaret Gibson's poems are always acts of
exuberant affirmation. In every poem she becomes a traveler, at high
lyric speed, between the realms of flesh and spirit, both of which
she fills to brimming with a language that's as rich in its sensuous
immediacy as it is profound in its spiritual urgency and interrogation.
. . . Poised between the glimmering mystery of icon and the plainly
tactile facts of evidence, these poems offer us no less than the gift
of true illumination."-Eamon Grennan
"I have been reading Margaret Gibson's poetry
for years, and she never disappoints. Her poems are at once contemplative
and down to earth, combining a musical ear and a sensitive, intelligent
eye. Icon and Evidence is a welcome addition to her work."-Linda
Pastan