“Old Orchard’s Palace” is Robert Gibbons’s second collection of poems written about his current hometown, the first being last year’s “Old Orchard Beach Cycle.”
Both books comprise what amount to diary entries in verse, containing observations and ruminations on the beach, the town, its denizens and the summer carnival atmosphere; recollections of past adventures in art, poetry, culture and travel; and cherished moments in the hyper-present that for most people arises after the age of about 70 or so.
Personally, I converge with Gibbons on a lot of this, including the approximate age factor and also a couple of temporary stays in Old Orchard, albeit at the distant beginning of my life, not the much later as for him. I honestly am not sure if such reader-convergence is necessary to appreciate the poems. Let me quote one in full, partly because it launched me in time, but also because its narrative circumstances seem timeless. “To Measure Time”:
Drive downtown & park in front of the library
closed on Sunday, but its little box
of free books behind glass
contains Richard Fariña’s Been Down So Long
It Looks Like Up to Me, which I take out,
harking as it is back to my own
young days from the same perspective,
placing it next The Bible on driver’s side door.
Here comes the neighborhood near fifteen-year-old
wearing nothing but short pleated skirt,
too small for her, & short-sleeve tee-shirt
sporting some band logo I’m too old to know,
along with carefree smile in 40°F cold.
Rilke was right to measure Time
in hours rather than years
or even days.
A counterculture novel from my own lost youth, and scripture. A misattired teenage girl in 40-degree March cold. Rilke, a poet-guide of our time. And more exactly, the vast closeness of the distance from the early 1970s to the mid-2020s.
I had two different runs at living in Old Orchard, and they both felt exactly like this. In one, I lived for a few spring months in a tiny cottage directly on the beach off East Grand Avenue. I was reading, not Rilke yet, but Tolkien and H.P. Lovecraft. Later I would discover that time was as stark, chaotic and fantastic as it seemed, partly due to the bleak, frantic, chaotic novel by Richard Fariña, who died in a motorcycle crash two days after its publication. A book that made me realize it was imperative to grow up, and soon.
The adolescent desolation of the East Grand beach area in March is unsurpassed in any memory since. Girls in tiny clothes were everywhere and nowhere, especially around the pier which is also neighbor to the library. Books and concupiscence have gone together for ages. They manifest with entirely different kinds of intensity at age 20 and age 70. I think this is what Gibbons means when he emphasizes Time measured in hours, not years.
My second, briefer sojourn in Old Orchard was a year and a half or so later, which in memory seems like a decade and a half, this time in the fall. Another summer cottage off West Grand, near downtown. “October’s heavy shadow outweighed sun’s / light by several tons,” we hear in “To Read the World,” just about sizing up my hour of desolation in Old Orchard almost 50 years ago.
My pen threatened to run out of ink.
The breeze picked up as if wanting to lift me
closer to the sea.
Yes, exactly. Exactly that. I think it’s OK to read like this, with your own memories bouncing off the poet’s. I can recommend Robert Gibbons’s poetry as well-crafted day treasures, full of past and present. And the more past you have, the more present it will be.
Gibbons’s other books include “Under the Great Divide with Ed Dorn” also published this summer, “Spent Some Time with Lorca in New York,” “Traveling Companion,” and at least 20 others. “Old Orchard’s Palace” is available through local bookstores and online from Littoral Books.
Off Radar takes note of poetry and books with Maine connections the first Friday of each month. Contact Dana Wilde at dwilde.offradar@gmail.com.
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