Autumn Grasses

The inspiration for most of the poems in Autumn Grasses was a daily engagement calendar that features the art of Japan—screens, hanging scrolls, painted silks, wood-block prints. In the dynamic stillness of this new visual field, Margaret Gibson steps away from the merely personal—“No one’s home”—to write poems that dip and swoop with the unguarded ease of birds in flight, verse as fluid and seamless as the movement of day to night, season to season. Trusting the power of unknowing, of imagination, these poems are delicate reminders of English-based forms filled with the spirit of Zen.

Autumn Grasses is both elegant and spontaneous, vivid and wise. Gibson’s rapt engagement with Japanese art has produced swift insight, detail that dazzles, a voice that can range from the serene to the earthy, always with a commitment to seeing each thing as it is, entering each moment with presence and zest.

Margaret Gibson is the author of eight books of poetry, including The Vigil, a finalist for the National Book Award; Long Walks in the Afternoon, a Lamont Selection of the Academy of American Poets; Earth Elegy: New and Selected Poems; and Icon and Evidence. She has been awarded two Pushcart Prizes, the James W. Boatwright Prize, the Melville Cane Award of the Poetry Society of America, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant for her work, which has also appeared in numerous anthologies and literary magazines. She is a visiting professor at the University of Connecticut and lives in Preston.