Skirmish by Dobby Gibson

Greywolf Press, 2009

Reviewed by Ben Kopel

No hope—see, that’s what gives me guts.

The Minutemen

I don’t have a fight song,

yet isn’t that alone reason enough to fight?

Dobby Gibson

What exactly is a skirmish? Think of it as a misunderstanding, a moment of confusion that gets your heart rate going and your fists tightened up. It is the space where our wires get tangled and the information gets a little roughed up. What is so refreshing about the poems in Dobby Gibson’s newest collection, titled Skirmish, is how the battles both small and large that take place over and over again between the covers are all willing to work with the reader to create a mystery the imagination is built to experience, rather than solve.

The book’s constructive confusion is born in the meeting of the items and ideas that litter the pages. As words and images occur and reoccur, they multiply in meaning and take on new shapes within the poems. This is spelled out in ‘The World As Seen Through a Glass of Ice Water’ as the mantra: Something happens something happens something happens./Repetition repetition repetition.

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. With this comes a great deal of awe, and with that, awe’s own moments of doubt. The poems start at the light of day and make their way chest out and off towards another evening spent trying to get some decent sleep while the snow piles up outside the window.

Before the snow returned as the memory

of a thousand snows,

while in sleep, arms twitched

with the memory of a thousand shovelings,

each time convincing ourselves

that it is not suffering that keeps us here,

it is the chance for something more beautiful

for being closer to what we hope

we’ve been dying for all along.

[from Limerance]

Gibson charges his words with both an ambiguity and an empathy that encourage the reader to make associations and separations they would not ordinarily make. This act of trust on the poet’s part is often taken for granted, and is one of the great accomplishments of Skirmish. The writer trusts the reader and the reader trusts the writer. The poems are aware of the balancing act at hand and use it to their full advantage. By believing in the audience’s ability to Negative Capability their way from line to line and moment to moment, Dobby’s poems gain the confidence to both confuse and illuminate in a single action.

The speaker’s attention is able to jump and dodge and duck from the kitchen to Wilt Chamberlain’s bones to the Chinese restaurant to an elephant to an ice cream headache. This is not to say that the poems sound scattershot. They move at the speed of a life in the process of living and are willing to use time and space to place the reader firmly in the present in order to make some pretty direct statements about the shared predicament at hand.

The twenty-two poems placed throughout the three sections of Skirmish titled “Fortune” offer great examples of Gibson’s strengths and inclinations. They use their smaller size (usually just a line or two under sonnet-length) to their advantage and compress language while still allowing the playing field to expand. The Fortunes bolt from directives to prophesies to promises and back again. They are aphoristic and yet unfamiliar, speaking directly to the reader and including them in the action. Take, for example, this Fortune from the end of the second section:

Water always can be found

in close proximity to water.

Or so you discover while

snorkeling in your own lagoon.

You have to lose her

to truly miss her. Yet you also have to miss her

to truly appreciate how lucky you are

that she’s never left.

There is very little you can do now.

Dreams, like wayward whales, echolocate in the deep.

On this planet, only humans

can remove their clothes without fear.

As words and ideas are placed side by side, we are placed in the middle and experience their odd harmony firsthand. There is the constant desire to escape, to step away from the confusion and find some rest there. We are dealing from page one with a speaker who wants to get out, but not away. Escape is hard and so many have tried and rather than fail, they often surrender. And yet the lesson learned is that, instead of avoiding bewilderment and surrendering to sense, the true escape comes from finding the symmetry inside the conflict. Gibson’s poems get us out of a jam by putting us right in the middle of it.

One of the most entertaining ways Dobby creates balance in his poems is by having someone or something perform an action (be it a plastic egg, a lonely freshman, a swimmer, an archeologist) and then following that with another noun performing a different, seemingly unrelated action. He often uses anaphora to glue the events together, and the results are always exciting and surprising. Here are examples from ‘Fumage’ and ‘Exit Strategy,’ respectively:

A janitor flips the switch,

and the whole school falls dark.

A wind blows, and a hundred

umbrellas explode black in the rain.

**

Another swimmer shakes the sea

from her ears.

Another archeologist gasps

as she uncovers the vase fragment

while another coroner discovers

yet another reason why,

and another boy with a balloon

looks into his mother’s eyes

and suddenly lets it go.

Events ignorant of each other and yet, in Gibson’s hands, totally connected and breathing through each other’s mouths. The juxtaposition of the nouns and their actions is not as interested in creating ideas about comparison and contrast as they are in shining a light on the moment of equivalence. He is using feedback to find the melody and then we can all sing along. Our escape hatch is located in the middle of the ruckus, where Gibson’s materials meet and their meaning blooms into the communal experience they are trying to communicate. To quote “Mercy,” We are born in tiny collisions. By we, they mean us. You. And me. And the speaker. And the poems.

In a recent interview, Gibson stated that, “if Frank O’Hara and D. Boon share a lesson for me, it’s that you don’t need a reason to make art other than to delight your friends.” This ideal is at the heart of Skirmish, and yet the book is totally inclusive to us, the readers, the strangers. The poet trusts us with the task at hand because we are in this together. Guided by a voice that has faith in our imagination’s ability to play, not along with, but inside the mystery presented to us, we are able to escape without being torn apart. We are born here and yet we have never been here before. His poems could be your life. Your life could be his poems.