The Pilot House

Poetry. When The Pilot House was chosen for the 2009 Black River Chapbook, the judges wrote, The poems in this chapbook made us ache; that’s how good they are. Rigsbee turns in this collection to spare poems that deal with pivots, revealing incidents when a momentary shift in perspective can bring a whole new world into view–or eclipse a once-firmly held memory. Clear and taut, insistent on the beauty of even harrowing events, it is a collection that handles the past in arresting ways, some potentially redemptive, others turning from reclamation’s siren. Poems about figures as varied as philosopher Richard Rorty, artist Nicholas Carone, astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, and poets William Bronk and Joseph Brodsky, call upon a richly lived writerly life in ways that give the collection purpose and dignity.