Passing through customs

the long version

Gibbons Ruark is a poetic naturalist, bending close to his subject to report with precision the complexity of beauty we overlook in our haste. Passing Through Customs, a retrospective of thirty years' work, is arranged in clusters of image, feeling, and thought, like runs of a particular kind of music. The reader moves from two coastal poems, years apart on the calendar of the poet's career, to poems about family and friends, through the shadows and solitudes of elegies, into sunlit homages to the saving grace of art. There are evocations of Ruark's beloved and strife-torn Ireland, others of Italy's bounty, portraits of now-missed.