Robert Gibb
Rewilding the Yard
Artist Statement: Talking & Listening to Plants
Growing up, my great good fortune was to have an untouched parcel of woods running behind the houses on our side of the road. I could walk right into it from my backyard, stepping out of the everyday world into the mysterious world of the trees, haunting those acres until every inch of them was familiar, all of it sheltering, knitted together, as I’d come to learn, by a system of fungi and roots. Beneath a break in the canopy there was a bank of buttercups I could visit for a short while each spring, as though a patch of sunlight was blossoming there. Canary yellow. The first time I was shaken by beauty.
ROBERT GIBB is the author of Sightlines (Poetry Press, 2021), his thirteenth full-length poetry collection, winner of the 2019 Prize Americana for Poetry. Other books include Among Ruins, which won Notre Dame’s Sandeen Prize in Poetry for 2017, After, which won the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize for 2016, and The Origins of Evening (Norton, 1997), which was a National Poetry Series selection. He has been awarded two NEA Fellowships, a Best American Poetry, a Pushcart Prize and Prairie Schooner’s Glenna Luschei and Strousse Awards.