The world of poetry — not just the New Brunswick literary community to which he gave so much — has lost a genial, unforgettable person. Robert (“Bob”) John Gibbs died last October, four months away from his ninety-fifth birthday. Thankfully, his poetry and fiction are far from lost; they remain between the covers of books, and in the memories and affections of his readers. To begin this inevitably incomplete appreciation, I will favour the present tense, affirming that the words of Robert Gibbs continue to live rather than falling into the past.
The words “grace” and “gracefulness” might suggest swans, gazelles or leopards, but look at what Gibbs does with the former word: “My poems should have the grace / to hop off the page / like the frog in the Scotchman’s porridge.” There a recurring word in Gibbs’s eight books of poetry mixes with a metaphorical wit characteristic of him. He relishes kennings (“puddingstone,” “shadowgraphs,” “springsongs”), puns and homonyms (“unread herring,” “prince of whales,” “my dotage my / anecdotage”). He sees, feels and hears “all the green liquefaction” — crickets and grasshoppers, finches and doves, burdocks and beggarticks. Strong earthly attachments are suggested by his book titles Earth Charms Heard So Early and Earth Aches, but Gibbs is also a poet of dreams and fantasies, of “chimerical dancers” and “some astral anti-bear.” Overlappings between day and night, the unconscious and the conscious, are touched on by his titles A Dog in a Dream, All This Night Long and A Kind of Wakefulness.
At times Gibbs writes metaphysically, unafraid to say things like “The Primal / is what we’re after,” and to ask possibly unanswerable questions: “Does love this love / concentrate or dissipate?”; “Who asked me to be a reader / of entrails?” For hints of his trust in the sacred and the redemptive, we can turn to titles of his fiction books, A Mouthorgan for Angels, Angels Watch Do Keep and Kindly Light — but his poetry is also nourished by New Testament allusions and influences, as well as by reachings out to Chinese koans and Japanese Noh theatre.
Poems by Gibbs first appeared in print in 1949, but he worked at his craft, studied and taught poetry, and developed his amalgam of styles before publishing The Road from Here in 1968 with New Brunswick Chapbooks, then his first full-length collection two years later with Fiddlehead Poetry Books. Earth Charms Heard So Early (1970) was followed by A Kind of Wakefulness (1973), All This Night Long (1978), The Tongue Still Dances: New and Selected Poems (1985), Driving to Our Edge (2003) and All Things Considered (2013), along with two chapbooks and a pamphlet. Gibbs’s Saint John childhood and youth feed into his two lively, scampishly humoured two short-story collections and his three novels, in which charm, gentleness and whimsy win the day. His valuable editorial work includes a major collection of E. J. Pratt’s poetry, the anthology Ninety Seasons: Modern Poems from the Maritimes, several volumes of Alden Nowlan’s prose and journalism, and many issues of The Fiddlehead, for which he served as both editor and poetry editor.
Through several paragraphs I’ve been writing “Gibbs,” but for a more personal conclusion to this tribute “Bob” sounds and feels natural. To those of us fortunate enough to be friends with Bob for years or decades (I first met him in 1970 while in high school, and for several years attended the informal Ice House Workshop, Bob a core member), his jocular storytelling and mischievous conversation entertained us, and his self-deprecations and kindness touched us. For many years I valued the arrival of Christmas cards and notes, always including deft Gibbsian turns of phrase. A June 1981 letter joked that he was “only a bean-sprout now,” and modestly tried to describe his recent League of Canadian Poets brochure of a few new poems: “. . . these hastily amassed poems — amassed? — well hardly a mass — assembled? — no, not an assembly either — anyway, this pamphlet.” When Bob was in his early nineties, hospitalized in Fredericton, his short-term memory sometimes faltered, but one day he recited to me from heart — without stumbling once — the first poem he ever published in The Fiddlehead. Surely a never-to-be repeated kind of minute in this startled friend’s life! A few years later, the last time I visited Bob, in the Riverview, NB Shannex complex, he looked more puckish than ever, maybe because his beard was shaved off, oddly causing a gain in cleancut youthfulness. Age had not dimmed his eyes’ brightness. He spoke fondly of his room and his caretakers. He was one of the most original people I’ve ever met. Bob had long championed Dickens, and during our final hour together he vaguely resembled some saintly Dickensian character, a marvellously individual man who considered himself blessed. I smile, wondering what wisecrack he would make dismissing such praise of him.
Passages from this tribute are adapted from “Springsongs and Shadowgraphs: Robert Gibbs,” All Manner of Tackle: Living with Poetry, by Brian Bartlett (Palimpsest, 2017), 123-126. That prose piece is a revision of the foreword to The Essential Robert Gibbs (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2012). For more on Bob’s family background and his education at UNB and Cambridge University, check out the biography in The Essential. . ., and “Three Decades and a Bit Under the Elms. A Fragmentary Memoir,” Bob’s account of his own work and play, yet also a people-filled recollection of a time and a place (Essays on Canadian Writing 31 [1985]: 231-39). Also track down Nancy Bauer’s expansive 1997 celebration of him, republished in A Great Cloud of Witnessing: Arts Journalism of Nancy Bauer, ed. Ian LeTourneau (Chapel Street Editions, 2024): 53-60. To hear Bob talk and read many of his poems, don’t miss the “Reading by Robert Gibbs,” a 2014 recording by Greg Brown, Radio Fiddlehead 6 (https:// thefiddlehead.ca/radio-fiddlehead-no.-6-redding-robert-gibbs).
Brian Bartlett
Halifax, NS
