In our last issue, I shared with Fiddlehead readers the sad news of Robert (Bob) Gibbs’ passing, which happened as we were going to print. In this issue, managing editor Ian LeTourneau has gathered a folio of Gibbs’ poetry that appeared in The Fiddlehead over the years — a bouquet of sorts to honour his life as a writer and his place on our masthead. Knowing that Gibbs was to become an editor and poetry editor at the magazine, it’s moving to read, from 1949, the first poem he ever published in The Fiddlehead. “Green Glows Life” was printed just four years into the life of our magazine — now in our 80th year — and two decades before he became a poetry editor. Gibbs was just nineteen at the time, and this short meditation on the power of life and death feels particularly poignant in the wake of his recent passing. I wonder if the poems themselves and every new issue count as some of the “gold chips” death leaves “heaping about.”
It’s especially moving to read this poem after the tribute to Gibbs from his longtime friend, Brian Bartlett, which follows this editorial and tells a story about the poem that I won’t spoil here. Read on for his eloquent and loving celebration of Gibbs’ life and work — thank you, Brian.
The perplexities of life, death and grief carry on from our tribute to Bob Gibbs and into the winning poem from the 2024 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Contest, “My Mother’s Hair.” Congratulations to Nancy Holmes on this bewildering and moving poem. And big thanks to our three judges, Meghan Kemp-Gee, D.M. Bradford and Colleen Coco Collins. Colleen quotes my own favourite lines from the poem as she writes, “So distilled and tightly woven is this poem that it makes for a moving ouroboric plait of tresses, grasses, nourishment and loss. Like the dusky frozen berries it describes, it is a potency of insights that melt to soft revelations. “Things are a gathering, so bound even the sun / can’t part them,” the narrator reminds us. “My Mother’s Hair” gathers itself in grief and microscopy. It looks closely, each word a loupe poised in magnification and celebration of the beautiful mundane. The observational travel of the poem is one of quiet heft, and loud love.” Kemp-Gee, for her part, writes of the “intriguing central question of this poem — a question spoken by a child, about the relationship between power and perception. I love the way this poem is so clear and accessible in its syntax, but also how it keeps the speaker’s thoughts and emotions just out of the light, just out of my reach, just on the border of the shadows. There’s a great deal of craft in these steady, measured couplets; by braiding striking image, memory, and sound, they coil, sew, and flood towards the un-foreseeable final line.” As usual, I congratulate everyone who dared send their work to the poetry contest and who otherwise submitted their writing for consideration. It takes guts to expose one’s work to other eyes — I feel this even decades into writing and publishing, and I’m grateful to everyone who takes that risk for the sake of sharing a little of themselves, a few of their words.
— Sue Sinclair
Fredericton, Wolastoqiyik Territory
