Publisher's Synopsis
Poetry. Robert Gibbons (Salem, MA, 1946) is one of the great secrets of contemporary US poetry. Gibbons says that ANIMATED LANDSCAPE is the collection he was destined to write. One hopes too that it's the collection destined to reveal him to a wider circle of readers. It places him firmly in the tradition of modern US poetry, following Olson, Creeley and the Objectivists, and alongside some of the best contemporary Anglophone poets, like Jean Sprackland, and great poets writing today in Spanish, like Cristian Aliaga and Sergio Raimondi. --Ben Bollig, Professor of Spanish American Literature, Oxford University
Robert Gibbons' new collection of poems lays bare the vast expanse of human history as a widening landscape of the most august imagination. Gibbons, a born maximalist, carries Charles Olson's excavations into the present tense, but does so in his own measure of music, personal and specific, yet universal and inclusive. ANIMATED LANDSCAPE never forgets history is not a then, but always now, always all around us. --Richard Deming, Director of Creative Writing, Yale University
