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Open Books: Events
February 26, 2009 07:30 PM
RICHARD ROBBINS & GARY THOMPSON
The West as American myth in decline haunts Richard Robbins’s The Untested Hand ($16 Backwaters). The poems are wry, moving, thoughtful, and feature often a lovingly mournful tone. He employs a fine lyrical sensibility, as when he writes that watching birds at a feeder through a window changes “all the indoor lives to sky.” The strength of his work lies in his compassionate and intelligent vision of the changed and changing West. In the reburial of a settler’s body found during a road project Robbins sees “a way / of reading old hope, dead in this light // but still moving eight ways into wind.” And he points us to the last lesson of the westward movement, “it’s never / going to be about land / again.”
Gary Thompson’s To the Archaeologist Who Finds Us ($18 Turning Point) is a gathering of lyrical narrative poems that have risen from a life lived with attention and feeling. His is a poetry gentled by love and sadness, as the section title “Tears or Praise or Both” makes clear. The personal and specific of family (as boy, husband, father, friend) and of place (the Midwest, the Pacific Northwest) open outward to the shared experience -- “we are held / in the arms / of names we hold / in common.” Though at times etched with human pain, the poems resonate with quiet joy -- we may be “mere trinkets dangling from the wrist of the goddess, / and she jangles us as she pleases, but aren’t we / beautiful this day?”
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