What the Heart Can Bear: Selected and Uncollected Poems, 1979-1993

Poetry. For Robert Gibb, ‘almost nothing’ is ‘almost enough, ’ and his achievement in this long-awaited and essential collection of his early books lies in the results of his labor: ‘The work of memory is permanence.’ Gibb is one of the folks to whose work I turn when I seem to forget how poems are written, or how they should be written. This book belongs among those worn American classics crammed on the rough-hewn shelf nailed onto the mudroom wall. Michael Waters