Description: The Garden of Earthly Delights Book of Ghazals ranges across time and place in visiting personal as well as historical and even imagined experience. As an abecedarian was once used to teach the basics of a thing--say, to recognize an alphabet--Gibson, who has labelled his collection a "scrambled abecedarian," suggests that all meaning arises out of disorder. However, it is from this disorder that the varied subjects of the poems, controlled by a single form comprising the collection, are shaped into a significance, whether that significance is to record a life at its start, or at its conclusion.
Degas In Degas' The Absinthe Drinker, the woman in the barlooks so alone and depressed as she stares at her drink. Earlier, she was imagining she would meet someone
as she was getting dressed; now, she stares at her drink. There are drunks all around. Everyone drinks absinthe.
Lower-class women love it best. They stare at the drink (it's a poison, literally; they could care less), as they pour
it over sugar to cut its bitterness. They stare and drink. Degas said he viewed women as if through a bathroom keyhole:
she gazes into her crystal ball's green mist--stares, drinks.
Review Quotes: "For decades now, through five award winning books, Stephen Gibson has been writing poems that rage against the malevolence of man and nature, but nowhere is his fury more concentrated than in The Garden of Earthly Delights Book of Ghazals. A kind of literary adaptation of Hieronymus Bosch's famous painting, the collection expresses a nightmare landscape of cruelty, ignorance, and enmity; a circus of horrors ranging through serial murderers and war-time atrocities to the more personal wounds of a childhood exploded in the collateral damage of war."
--Ed Falco
author of Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha, new and selected stories.