Graywolf
Press, 2019
Dobby
Gibson’s latest collection Little Glass Planet with Graywolf Press is
his strongest book yet. The poems charge full steam ahead, with reckless
abandon, trafficking in one-liners, pop cultural hooks, and a vernacular
familiarity that is both funny and wise.
Readers
will love a poem like “Elegy for Abe Vigoda” as it tries to enlist us in the
belief that the deceased actor was a kind of sitcom super hero, or celebrity
saint to a sick little boy:
So is the rumor true? Yes. Abe Vigoda has died.
That name, like something resurrected
from a dictionary. Abe: another word
for honesty. And vigoda, meaning:
a scared temple for vampires.
About the past I never feel the same way twice.
When I was sick and my father somewhere
across the planet, a Trinitron television
wheeled into my bedroom dispensed the medicine
of Abe Vigoda by slow drip.
I could hear the ice thunder
as it calved in the pond across the street.
Like a superhero with the powers
of an exhausted mime, Abe Vigoda cured
my fear of ghosts while teaching me
how to wear the suit of adulthood
the right amount of reluctantly,
and holster my revolver behind
my back where I can never reach it.
This
poem is fluent in the American language of television but delves into serious
wordplay with his teasing “vigoda, meaning: / a sacred temple for
vampires.” The memory is believable, too, because we remember Vigoda’s
character from Barney Miller, and the pre-adolescent anguish of slowly growing
up in that time.
Another
standout poem is “Why I Don’t Have any Tattoos” with its tired Chinese
restaurants on Lake Street that close at nine and scratch-off tickets and snow
hitting the poet’s face like:
the needles touching down
on the skin of the invincible
inside Leviticus Tattoos.
Already I’m a blue butterfly
landing on your shoulder blade,
I’m a bald eagle carrying lightning bolts
across my chest. At some point
I’m going to rise up
into these trees and turn gold.
This
poem catalogs a snowy evening in Midwestern America, but quickly zooms into a
Tattoo shop where it takes a surreal turn as the poet says, “Already I’m a blue
butterfly landing on your shoulder blade.” This poem feels both playful and
profound as it stirs up a sense of longing for a greater sense of reality, one
Gibson seems to be in touch with and articulates with ease.
Gibson’s
quick wit and vernacular gymnastics are on display again in the poem “Fall In”
where he says, “This is my love letter to the world, / someone call us a
sitter. / We’re going to be here awhile.” There are many beautiful poems in
this collection, including the longer sequence “Fickle Sun, Long Shadow”, but a
personal favorite is “Poem for an Antique Korean Fishing Bobber” where the
title of the poetry collection stems from:
Little glass planet,
I like picking you up.
As if I’m holding my own thought,
one blown molten with a puff
of some craftsman’s breath—is it still inside
you?
You are a beautiful bauble it’s hard to imagine
anyone hurling you into the sea,
but eventually we all have a job to do.
Throughout
the book, Gibson shows us the world both familiar and new, again and again, with
a powerful signature ingenuity, and a kind of culture-speak that does not talk
down to its audience.
In
Little Glass Planet, Dobby Gibson repackages the known world with breath-taking
observations and incongruous associations tossed as lightly as coins into a
wishing well, and all of us who read these poems are made richer for it.
Chris Banks is
a Canadian poet and author of five collections of poems, most recently Midlife
Action Figure by ECW Press 2019. His first full-length collection, Bonfires,
was awarded the Jack Chalmers Award for poetry by the Canadian Authors'
Association in 2004. He is the poetry editor of The Miramichi Reader.