Passing Through Customs

<p>Gibbons Ruark is a poetic naturalist bending close to his subject to report with precision the complexity of beauty we overlook in our haste. A truly imaginative writer as well however Ruark gives back to us not merely mirrored documentation but reflections fully colored by his sight and his spirit; like water and sky both subject and poet are illuminated in his poems.Passing Through Customs a retrospective of thirty years' work is arranged in clusters of image feeling and thought like runs of a particular kind of music. The reader moves from two coastal poems years apart on the calendar of the poet's career to poems about family and friends through shadows and solitudes of elegies into sunlit homages to the saving grace of art. There are evocations of Ruark's beloved and strife-torn Ireland others of Italy's bounty portraits of now missed faces and the abiding presence of his wife. This gallery of words so strongly affecting steadies and moves us at once.Passing Through Customs leads us into the reaches of Ruark's sensibility certainly but also through inherited forms and ceremonies enriching to us all.</p>