The garden of earthly delights book of ghazals : a scrambled abecedarian / Stephen Gibson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gibson, Stephen, 1948- author.

Contributor:

Laura Jan Meyerson Poetry Fund.

Standardized Title:

Poems. Selections

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American poetry.

Genre:

Ghazals (Poetry)

Poetry.

Physical Description:

57 pages ; 23 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Huntsville, Texas : Texas Review Press, [2016]

Summary:

The Garden of Earthly Delights Book of Ghazals ranges across time and place in visiting personal as well as historical and even imagined experience. As an abecedarian was once used to teach the basics of a thing-say, to recognize an alphabet-Gibson, who has labelled his collection a "scrambled abecedarian," suggests that all meaning arises out of disorder. However, it is from this disorder that the varied subjects of the poems, controlled by a single form comprising the collection, are shaped into a significance, whether that significance is to record a life at its start, or at its conclusion. In Praise of the Garden of Earthly Delights Book of Ghazals, For decades now, through five award winning books, Stephen Gibson has been writing poems that rage against the malevolence of man and nature, but nowhere is his fury more concentrated than in The Garden of Earthly Delights Book of Ghazals. A kind of literary adaptation of Hieronymus Bosch's famous painting, the collection expresses a nightmare landscape of cruelty, ignorance., and enmity; a circus of horrors ranging through serial murderers and war-time atrocities to the more personal wounds of a childhood exploded in the collateral damage of war. In this scrambled abecedarian, Gibson works with the demanding form of the ghazal. Here he is, as he has always been, a master craftsman, a poet who revels in the power of precisely controlled language to contain unwieldy emotions. The ghazal, with its required repetition of end words and rhyme schemes, provides the cage necessary to contain this much anger "for past-life injuries, for ancestral curses, for spells cast on me, for the god I disappointed and disown". Yet underneath all the fury at all the travesties visited in these poems, there is also the poet himself his voice spent calling attention to our endless barbarity, and in so doing lamenting the failure of compassion, love, justice, and kindness. Book jacket.

Contents:

Surreal

WW II

Fugu

H

Civil War photography

X

Ancestry

Ice

Bath water and a lie

Nada

Rome

Ossuary

Cartes-de-visite

Pond

Spirit photos

Eggs

Degas

Goat

Killers

Pricks

Tweets

Ubi sunt

Irish-American

Eggplant

Martyrs

Portraits

Beds

Li Po in Civil War photography

Ages

Presences

Old photos

Looking at World War II photos in City Place Barnes and Noble

Judas goat with Manhattan skyline

V

YouTube animals

Ut's photo

Gulf

Times Square yoga

Ghosts

Q

Jane Doe

Vinegar

Meatloaf

Nineteenth century execution photos

Death plays a trick on Amy Winehouse

Lamb chops at the Paris Too Café, West Palm Beach

Scrambled eggs

Pepper(s)

Z

Cadaver synod

Art

American history quiz photos

Ghazal

Cribs

White

Births.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Laura Jan Meyerson Poetry Fund.

ISBN:

9781680030815

1680030817

OCLC:

946012616

Publisher Number:

99966562667