Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 14, 1993 TAG: 9303140271
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by CAMERON SQUIRES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
NEW POEMS HONEST, DELICATE
YOUR HEART WILL FLY AWAY. By David Rigsbee. The Smith. $10.95.David Rigsbee, of Virginia Tech's English department, has just published a collection of 29 poems, "Your Heart Will Fly Away." These are stubbornly honest, yet wrenchingly delicate works. Note the lines, "blank angels/ and marzipan Alpine figures jerking and circling/ through the rococo facade of a German scene."
The title poem comes from a refrain in a 1958 Tommy Edwards song which evoked the time when President Kennedy died, and the world seemed transformed. "Crickets," one of Rigsbee's best-known poems, begins,
"They are without memory, making
up the night continually,
like Scheherazade."
It is the definitive poem on the cricket, though not to Rigsbee. "That poem will haunt me until I am dead!" he said in a recent interview, but he still reads it occasionally.
He believes that a poem should have tension. It should, he says, "negotiate between the thing that it wants to represent, and the fact that it doesn't represent that thing after all." In the title poem he writes:
"And when you hold me, how warm
you are. But we held nothing except the words,
which would one day weight less than a breath."
Like most poets, Rigsbee engages the perennial themes of death, love and sex:
"Better that we trouble,
I say, like spent pods from a weed,
released from their pinched destinies.
He writes in a darkly luminous poem called "Lumber," which is webbed with intricacy.
For Rigsbee, communicating that intricacy is a challenge. For the past 10 years, his poetry has turned outward. "The common view is that poetry is subjectively based. You write about your subject, about what your subject is doing," he maintains. "Instead of writing poems in first-person singular, I would like to make them into public thoroughfares." That's what happens in the evocative "Trawlers at Montauk," in which "one's life lumbers by like a trawler, torn, top-heavy."
David Rigsbee has unquestionably become an accomplished poet. He has grown from a quiet voice to one full of individual insight. What he says of the night in his poem "The Rescue" could also be said of his reputation as a writer - it "will slide forward like a convertible top."
Cameron Squires is a senior majoring in communications at Radford University.