Nelson Algren won a National Book Award for “The Man with the Golden Arm” 50 years ago, at the first awards ceremony, and Chicago literature continues to attract attention for writing that is full of sentiment, yet not sentimental. Chicago writing has metabolized from its naturalist origins, and we are proud that two wonderful Chicago writers were honored as finalists this year at the NBA ceremony in New York.
We have written much about Aleksandar Hemon’s novel, “The Lazarus Project,” a finalist for the fiction award, but in this crazy world, poetry always seems to get the short end of the stick. We do our small part to correct that woeful problem by offering you a poem by Reginald Gibbons from “Creatures of a Day” a finalist this year for the NBA poetry award.
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These Sideways Leaps, Remembering.
By Reginald Gibbons
A worn red chair’s dignified stillness
in a ranch-house mud room where
a clock was always counting out the
lifetimes of horses. A big
shabby one-floor weekend house on
12-foot stilts near the Gulf where the
faithful took kids for a weekend
of Bible study but we all
ran through the damp salt air at dusk
laughing even though the teachers
called us. Live possum young hissing
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on their dead mother’s back. With our
guns we shot armadillos. Out
of white smoke from a grassfire I
had caused came a man appearing
and walking toward me, I thought, but
going past me to get water
to drink. At Mother’s slow, clinky
spinet, I tried to quicken what
I could do with Bach’s “Italian
Concerto.” My father turned his
weary green 1952
car into our driveway (none of
this happens any more) (did it
ever happen?), he braked, cut the
engine, swung open the dull door
and wearing his hat he got out.
Reprinted by permission of LSU Press from “Creatures of a Day: Poems by Reginald Gibbons.” Copyright 2008 by Reginald Gibbons.
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