Homage to Longshot O’Leary

Poetry. It should come as no surprise that Reg Gibbons’ new book sometimes reads like Latin American or Eastern European Poetry. His years editing TriQuarterly, bringing to American readers a range of poets and writers who reached into the full extent of human consciousness — historical and political as well as emotional and mythic — suffuse and shape this ambitious, fully realized, and moving book. Now, in our literary climate divided between reactionary astheticism and fragmented multiculturalism, arrives HOMAGE — a whole poetry, ethical and artful, political and heart-known. It is a work of sere vision and lamentation, brilliantlyand variously made, but it is irreducible to any one of its threads because it is woven of love and hope — Linda McCarriston. Gibbons is now a professor of English at Northwestern University. He also teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.