Gibbons Ruark

Gibbons Ruark Poems

Gibbons Ruark Biography

Gibbons Ruark (born 1941) is a contemporary American poet. Known for his deeply personal often elegiac lyrics about his native North Carolina and beloved Ireland, Ruark has had poetry in such publications as The New Yorker, The New Republic, and Poetry. His collections include Rescue the Perishing, Small Rain, Keeping Company, Reeds, A Program for Survival, Passing Through Customs: New and Selected Poems, Staying Blue, and, most recently, The Road to Ballyvaughan. He has won numerous awards including three Poetry Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, residencies at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland and a Pushcart Prize. Gibbons Ruark was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, the son of a Methodist minister. When he was nine years old, his mother was hospitalized with a severe case of Polio, an incident which he writes about in several poems. He was brought up in various towns in North Carolina and in 1963 graduated from the University of North Carolina. That same year, he moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, where he and his wife Kay were married on October 5. Initially working as a bus boy in at the Lord Jeffrey Inn, he eventually earned a master’s degree from the University of Massachusetts. While a student there, he took a poetry workshop with Joseph Langland and became friends with the poets Michael Heffernan and Robert Francis. Ruark’s first book of poetry A Program for Survival was published in 1971 and received warm critical reviews. In the mid 1970s, Ruark lived for a year in Italy, which provided him with material for many of the poems in his next two books, Reeds in 1978 and Keeping Company in 1983. In 1976, Ruark met the Irish novelist Benedict Kiely who was visiting the University of Delaware for a term. In 1978 he visited Ireland for the first time. He returned to Ireland many times and was welcomed not only by his friend Kiely but also by the Nobel Prize–winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney and other Irish writers. The influence of Ireland can be seen in much of Ruark’s poetry in the late 1980s and Irish subject matter is especially prevalent in many of the poems in his 1991 Rescue the Perishing. In the 1990s Ruark continued to write and teach at the University of Delaware. Passing Through Customs an edition of his new and selected poems was published in 1999.)

The Best Poem Of Gibbons Ruark

Night Fishing

We have come again, my father and I,
To the edge of the known land, to the streak
Of sand that lips the undermining sea.
But we are not allowed this time to speak

Of horizons, for the sun has dropped
Behind us, and night is all of a piece.
The lights go out in the cottages propped
Above the black dunes, room by room the lights

Go out, the children fall asleep, and soon
Whole families sleep as calm as children,
Nursed by the motions of the wind and tide.
My fishing rod springs and quivers and the line

Loops over the breakers; I watch the sinker
Splash and start to reel in steadily, steadily,
Feeling the current drag. Downshore, my father
Tosses with a pitcher's ease, then braces

His legs against the undertow and waits.
His cigarette stings a hole in the dark.
The odor of fish grows stronger as the wind
Switches and the sea crawls to us with its sharks.

My father stands like a driven piling.
I move downshore. Somewhere not far inland,
Where the afternoon's shrimpboats are nuzzling
In their sleep, his hometown leans into the river.

Below us, empty of fishers, the old pier
Sways over climbing waters, the salt wash
Rinses the pilings scabbed with barnacles.
The timbers shudder in the tidal rush.

The water lifts, but we do not move back
Until the seaweed swirls about our thighs
And empty bait trays tumble in the slack.
We reel and pull and reel and pull again.

Somewhere in that darkened row of houses
Our women sleep in their beautiful order,
But here on the swift-dissolving shore
I drift to my father in the night's one water.

Yearly we come to this familiar coast
To wade beside each other in the shallows,
Reaching for bluefish in the ocean's darkness
Till our lines are tangled and our tackle lost.

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