Reginald Gibbons – författare

Few people writing today could successfully combine an intimate knowledge of Chicago with a poet’s eye, and capture what it’s really like to live in this remarkable city. Embracing a striking variety of human experience—a chance encounter with a veteran on Belmont Avenue, the grimy majesty of the downtown El tracks, domestic violence in a North Side brownstone, the wide-eyed wonder of new arrivals at O’Hare, and much more—these new and selected poems and stories by Reginald Gibbons celebrate the heady mix of elation and despair that is city life. With Slow Trains Overhead, he has rendered a living portrait of Chicago as luminously detailed and powerful as those of Nelson Algren and Carl Sandburg.

Gibbons takes the reader from museums and neighborhood life to tense proceedings in Juvenile Court, from comically noir-tinged scenes at a store on Clark Street to midnight immigrants at a gas station on Western Avenue, and from a child''s piggybank to nature in urban spaces. For Gibbons, the city’s people, places, and historical reverberations are a compelling human array of the everyday and the extraordinary, of poverty and beauty, of the experience of being one among many. Penned by one of its most prominent writers, Slow Trains Overhead evokes and commemorates human life in a great city.

Jorge Guillén is one of Spain''s most important and productive poets of the twentieth century; yet though recently honored with prestigious literary prizes in Spain, Italy, and the United States, he remains little known in this country. This selection of his poetry and his commentary on the poems comprise an extraordinary introduction of the poet to an English-speaking audience. Ranging over the nearly sixty years of Guillén''s poetic career, this anthology consists of the poet''s own selection of forty-one poems that represent for him the coherence and unity of his life''s work. His commentary on each poem explains its place and significance in this context. With the original Spanish and the English translations on facing pages, the anthology proceeds thematically. The poet asks us to consider the architecture of his work as a whole, and not necessarily his development as a poet. At Guillén''s invitation, the translators visited him at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where they taped the poet reading and talking about his poetry for more than five hours. Guillén on Guillén is the edited transcript of that meeting.Originally published in 1979.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This new collection by award-winning author Reginald Gibbons explores human experience and memory in ordinary settings—city apartments, rural roads, soap operas, and juvenile court—as way to understand the depths of thought and feeling in our everyday encounters. These narrative meditations explode with imagery, looking and listening deeply into our everyday experience—the extraordinary within the ordinary, the impossible within the possible.

Reginald Gibbons is the author of numerous collections of poetry and fiction. His book Creatures of a Day was a poetry finalist for the National Book Award. He lives in Evanston, IL, where he teaches at Northwestern University.