Skirmish

“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.”
With sheer wit and keen observation, Dobby Gibson’s Skirmish puts into conflict the private and public self, civil disobedience and civic engagement, fortunes told and fortunes made. These poems imaginatively, sometimes manically, move from perception to perception with the speed of a mind forced moment to moment to make sense of distant war and local unrest, global misjudgment and suspicious next-door neighbors, the splice-cuts of the media and the gliding leaves on the Mississippi River.

"When a reader grabs a book of poems, he should expect not only to be moved but to have a little fun… [Gibson] understands this. In his second book, ‘Skirmish,’ he shakes the reader at every turn.”

"A smart, clever, pyrotechnical book that will hold your attention.”

“Like a photo whose power lies in having its focal point not in the middle of the picture but on its periphery, Gibson demonstrates that it’s not about what you’re seeing—it’s about what you’re ignoring.”

“Gives voice to the idea of the intention of memory, a sense of floating that is in tension with the movement and clear friction implied by the book’s title. And then, at the book’s most heartbreaking moments, a rupture ends the silent, wanting speculation.”

“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.”