Opinel

The poems’ structure range from neat tercets to indented spheres hovering within the pages, lifting as if to take off to the outer parts of space. They are like jewels–incredibly beautiful and neat yet its mysteriousness is exactly what makes it so tantalizing.

“I take it as a sign of ordinary/unknowns,” says the speaker in Rebecca Kaiser Gibson’s poem “On the Connecticut.” That’s the feel of her poems. Hard-edged and edgy, they look hard at the ordinary—a narcissistic mother, rhododendron buds, mushroom spores, suburban life in the fifties—and crack these scenes into shards of new understanding. In forms of fracture, Rebecca Gibson finds forms of preservation, a vision of what “emptied of remains, remains.”

In a world over obsessed with the visions of youth, Rebecca Kaiser Gibson’s poetry reminds us what we treasure in a mature voice: the extraordinary patience, the quiet resignations, an all-right-then-I’ll-show-you kind of intimacy, and a deep, reassuring sense of what matters, and why. A friendlier, kinder guide than Virgil, Gibson’s poems grant us entry into widening circles of pleasure and pain, life and loss, where—even if hope need not be abandoned, still the proximities are just out of reach. Avid witness to everything that finds an almost erotic animation in her world, from the mid-winter rhododendron, Cadaverous / stick-selves, hobbled, / bobbing, unable to desist, to the Rio-born Manchurian cat, the one in the bamboo (if it has no soul, then . . . ) to the giver of coconuts, in yellow necklace, / turban of sun, a singlet, blue, Gibson encourages us to reach / breathless at their breathing—such gestures, / the stretched neck, the slight breath. She’s the poet we need when we’re alone, which, you will notice, we are.

Sharply observed, intensely felt, and alive with crisp images and surprising diction, the poems of Opinel range over painful childhood memories, adult immersions in “foreign” cultures, and the mysteries at the heart of long-lasting, self-renewing love. In all Rebecca Kaiser Gibson weighs and sifts experience, assays it not only for its worth, but also for its hints about undiscovered meanings and complexities of feeling. The sturdy, all-purpose peasant knife that gives this collection its title turns out to be an image of the poet’s mind at work, an instrument that enables her to peel back the surfaces, restlessly hoping that a revelation might be here, vivid and real, in what she holds in her hands.

In a debut full-length collection named for a versatile peasant knife of the French Alps, Gibson, who teaches poetry at Tufts University, sets out to metaphorically “scrape leather,/ carve cheese, untangle vine,/ release trapped lambs, hack/ out ice, slice flesh.” The collection is full of impressions of childhood, India, nature, death, trauma, and the wonders of the commonplace. Watching the patrons and workers in a café, she writes, “I can hardly eat, I am so full/ of love for those/ who don’t know I love them.” Gibson also celebrates the beauty of growing older as she ponders “the age spots/ I’ve just noticed on my arm/ like sprinkled cinnamon, a sweet touch,/ received.” She reveals her talents for finding the moments when nature becomes a mirror for love: “I’ll dream of you, the swallows still/ the purple shield of wheat fields hushed.” Alternating between conversational and ornate diction, Gibson observes the quotidian and draws moments of clarity from cacophonous swirls of sensuous and penetrating language.