“Wise and brave, with a pure
sense of truth and adventure that is rare, and never diminishes.”
—BLOOMSBURY REVIEW
“Gibson mixes the language of
public discourse, science, TV and everyday conversation in a chatty if bleak
voice that is both accessible and satisfyingly challenging.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
“Dobby Gibson’s
first book, Polar, marked him as one
of the most talented meditative poets of his generation: unusually adept in
syntax, philosophical in spirit, with a commitment to both exploration and
coherence. Gibson’s poems in Skirmish work
by a kind of sonar: when the speaker of a Dobby Gibson poem says, in a typical
epigrammatic moment, ‘On this planet only humans can remove their clothes
without fear,’ we are placed in a creative predicament; we must wrangle with
the fiction of the proposition itself, and the way it illuminates the actual
world of which it is a part. This is a poetry of—in Gibson’s own
terms—echolocation, that makes us grapple with the ghosts of speech and world
at once. The poems of Skirmish are both entertaining and
troubling, and full of complex contemporary sensibility.”
—TONY HOAGLAND
“The way the pieces of Skirmish crash into each other
while simultaneously complimenting each other gives way to the moments of human
experience that make Gibson’s voice such a genuine one.”
