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    Last Lake
    Last Lake
    Last Lake
    Ebook87 pages27 minutes

    Last Lake

    By Reginald Gibbons

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    About this ebook

    From Ritual
     
    A slow parade of old west enthusiasts,
    camp song and hymn, came in along the winding
     
    way where rural declined to suburban, slow
    riders and wagoners passing a cow staked
     
    to graze, some penned cattle looking vacantly
    up—not in vacant lots the ancient icons
     
    of wealth they had been in odes, prayers and epics,
    in sacrifices and customs of bride-price
     
    or dowry.  (It’s good people no longer make
    blood sacrifices, at gas stations and stores,
     
    for example, and in the crunching gravel
    parking lots of small churches—oh but we do.)

    “The evening forgives the alleyway,” Reginald Gibbons writes in his tenth book of poems—but such startling simplicities are overwhelmed in us by the everyday and the epochal. Across the great range of Gibbons’s emblematic, vividly presented scenes, his language looks hard at and into experience and feeling. Words themselves have ideas, and have eyes—inwardly looking down through their own meanings, as the poet considers a lake in the Canadian north, a Chicago neighborhood, a horse caravan in Texas, a church choir, a bookshelf, or an archeological dig on the steppes near the Volga River. The last lake is the place of both awe and elegy.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateOct 10, 2016
    ISBN9780226417592
    Last Lake

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      Book preview

      Last Lake - Reginald Gibbons

      Last Lake

      Last Lake

      Reginald Gibbons

      The University of Chicago Press

      Chicago and London

      REGINALD GIBBONS is a Frances Hooper Professor of Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University. Gibbons is a poet, novelist, essayist, editor, and translator, and his many books include translations of Sophocles, Euripides, and modern Spanish and Mexican poets; the novel Sweetbitter and a forthcoming collection of short stories; the critical study How Poems Think; and nine books of poems, among them the National Book Award finalist Creatures of a Day and Slow Trains Overhead: Chicago Poems and Stories.

      The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

      The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

      © 2016 by The University of Chicago

      All rights reserved. Published 2016.

      Printed in the United States of America

      25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16    1 2 3 4 5

      ISBN-13: 978-0-226-41745-5 (paper)

      ISBN-13: 978-0-226-41759-2 (e-book)

      DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226417592.001.0001

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Gibbons, Reginald, author.

      Title: Last lake / Reginald Gibbons.

      Other titles: Phoenix poets.

      Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Series: Phoenix poets

      Identifiers: LCCN 2016018416 | ISBN 9780226417455 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226417592 (e-book)

      Classification: LCC PS3557.I1392 L37 2016 | DDC 811/.54—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov

      This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

      For my beloved C.

      Contents

      Acknowledgments

      ONE

      A Neighborhood in Chicago

      Memorial Day

      Belief

      Last Lake

      Canasta

      On Self and Soul

      1. The night’s a metonym

      2. A ploughman leans his everything

      3. (Bright Candlelight)

      4. The question isn’t whether we should be

      5. The plenitude of what is is the diet of the mind

      6. Soul, the word, is ancient (from Old English)

      7. Livingness itself, neither bad nor benign

      Ritual

      A Bookshelf

      Divergence

      A Veteran

      TWO

      Dark Honey

      1. In the rainy sub-

      2. I remember that

      3. Gods never were. And

      4. In seaside autumn

      5. (The Big River)

      6. The skull has evolved

      7. (I sense by its im-

      8. The cranium dome

      9. Poor old page-earth—sized

      10. Mandelshtam’s Greek bees

      11. Even on remote

      12. This craft of the ear’s

      13. Rivers of gasping

      14. (But . . .)

      15.

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