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Robert McNamara, May 26, 2008 (view all comments by Robert McNamara)
In a recent review, Al Alvarez remarked that few poets today read Robert Southwell for pleasure. Although the subject of his review was Geoffrey Hill, it might well have been David Rigsbee, whose “Sonnets to Hamlet,” the first of two sonnet sequences in his new Cloud Journal,” begins with a quotation from Southwell’s “The Burning Babe” (as well as one from Hamlet). Southwell’s figure is a thread running through the sequence, which takes as its occasion a fire in a chicken processing plant in Hamlet, NC, in which 25 workers lost their lives due to the plant’s policy of keeping all doors locket to prevent theft. The facts of the fire are in evidence of the poems, but Rigsbee doesn’t dwell on them. Rigsbee is a Southerner, white and working class by birth, and one feels in these poems a human solidarity that refuses to reduce the dead to victims. Rather, he carries us quickly and surely from the glimpsed world into one that counts not only social justice but the possibilities for consolation in the face of tragic loss.

Rigsbee handles his material with what I would describe as a Southern Baroque sensibility. But the vision of the sonnets is not, finally, Christian, and John Coltrane, a native son of Hamlet, offers in his music more by way of consolation and meaning than does traditional faith. In this, Rigsbee follows one of his mentors, Richard Rorty.

The sonnets in the second sequence are equally rich and equally demanding. “Cloud Journal” is dedicated to the poet’s mother, whose last days provide less the occasion than the spur for meditations on mortality and all of its time-frames. The elemental looms large in these poems, as does human frailty. These are poems that quietly begin from the great facts of time and change and engage them with the resources of poet and philosopher, reaching no great claims or solutions but a richness of affirmations of “certain / acuities” in the face of the otherness of the world.

Both series showcase Rigsbee’s versatile and accomplished handlings of the verse form as well as his probing sympathy and intelligence, his pursuit in poems of what escapes our other ways with words. If we are beyond the point at which the sonnet can be put to radically novel uses, we are not beyond the point where such seamless handling of the form as Rigsbee’s deserves our praises. These are wonderful poems, demanding, and rewarding the attention they ask.

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Product Details

ISBN:

9781934999028

Author:

Rigsbee, David

Publisher:

Wordtech Communications

Subject:

General

Publication Date:

March 2008

Binding:

Paperback

Language:

English

Pages:

69

Dimensions:

9.00x6.00x.19 in. .28 lbs.

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