Second Nature: Poems

"Margaret Gibson has created a voice and an art that connect the sensuous experience of the physical world with the inner life. The poems in Second Nature establish a vibrant and interlacing balance between these two realms, each the cause and each the effect of the other. Gibson's exploratory language is pure, exact, and richly musical." ---Pattiann Rogers

"Learn of the green world what can be thy place," wrote Ezra Pound. In Second Nature, her tenth collection of poems, Margaret Gibson takes Pound's stern counsel to heart. The poems move from acute observation to an empathy, participation, and intimacy that continues Gibson's search to experience the "one body" of the world in direct encounter and to translate that encounter into words. Whether she takes us to Greece or explores the woods that surround her house, all of the poems arise from the desire to embrace a "fierce, clear-eyed attention" and to be open to revelation. Second Nature gives us poems that are a ripening of years of poetic and spiritual practice---simply Gibson her best.

"Margaret Gibson's mix of material and spiritual ways of apprehending her world---a far-ranging world containing natural facts and forces, containing love, human griefs, and unsentimental understanding, a world of feeling that by now is `second nature' to her---beget poems of great depth and clarity, poems that explore `the intimate swirl' of all that lives. This is your song, too, the world she attends upon tells her, and it is this fusion of animate environment and questing, questioning self that lends such digniry and distinction to this latest and in many ways richest chapter in Gibson's ongoing adventure: her patient, sifting exploration of what matters to one human, humane, entirely open-eye consciousness." ---Eamon Grennan

Margaret Gibson is the author of ten books of poems---including Long Walks in the Afternoon, a Lamont Selection; The Vigil, a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry; and one Body, winner of the Connecticut Book Award in Poetry---and one prose memoir. A native of Virginia, she lives in Preston, Connecticut.