Young Woman with a Cane: Poems

Young Woman with a Cane explores the social, cultural, and personal dimensions of feeling, experience, and thought. This new collection by Reginald Gibbons ranges from nature and ecological crises to human conflicts of migration, self-determination, ancient war, and the corruption of political mores. In language intensified by strong rhythms, figures, and bounteous vocabulary, the book presents short lyrics alongside satires, laments, and witness, with subjects moving from elk in the Dakotas to underlings supporting knavish power, from celebrating words as a kind of phonetic music to brief narratives of interaction and consciousness. Above all, Gibbons’s poems fluently and inventively articulate both directness and nuance.

The long prose poem that gives the book its title and other pieces evoke the historical depths, echoes, and precedents of present-day life. Gradually the book provides energetic metaphorical and notional riffs on violence, on wars both past and recent and ongoing, as it satirizes the corrupted politics of our age. Yet it also presents tender, sometimes melancholic treatments of everyday life. With a panoply of poetic forms, marked throughout by a lively pleasure in the language and the lines, Gibbons conjures an extensive range of story and experience, feeling and thought.

Reginald Gibbons is the author of fourteen books of poems, including Creatures of a Day, a finalist for the National Book Award. He has also published volumes of fiction, essays, and translations. A native of Texas, he now lives in Evanston, Illinois, where he is the Frances Hooper Professor Emeritus in the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University.