In what NewSouth would call a different kind of poetic justice, we were delighted to learn that a poem by David Rigsbee from the newly published The Red Tower was featured on Verse Daily this past Sunday (December 5). The poem called “Equinox” observes, “It is the Equinox, and today I feel / the thrall that reconciles the animal / and the hole, cloud and lake, the sexes.” Verse Daily selects a single poem a day for featuring on its website in an effort to promote poets and poetry on the internet.
In his review of The Red Tower for Wild Goose Poetry Review, Scott Owens refers to “Equinox” as one of his favorite Rigsbee poems.
On the importance of Rigsbee’s work, Owens says: “Throughout his decades-long work, Rigsbee has encouraged us to live better, to make life better, by embracing the present tense.”
The Cortland Review, an international poetry journal, made The Red Tower its featured book in their November issue. Read through and listen to audio clips on the journal’s website; it also includes Rigsbee’s review of Stephen Dobyns’s Winter’s Journey.
Rigsbee’s work was acknowledged in NYC recently, when he was asked to read his ode to Nicolas Carone at a memorial service for the artist. One of the early New York Abstract Expressionists, winner of the Prix de Rome in 1941, and a friend of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, Carone passed away last summer. In Rigsbee’s words, he was a “Ulysses / who learned to chisel frowns from quarried stone, / who painted ugliness like an angel.” Read the full poem in The Brooklyn Rail.
Rigsbee will read from The Red Tower at a joint poetry reading with Peter Makuck on Wednesday, January 12, at 7 p.m. at FlyLeaf Books in Chapel Hill. Makuck will read from selections of twenty-five new poems and forty years of his own work. To learn more about other readings and events for David Rigsbee, visit David Rigsbee’s official website.
David Rigsbee’s The Red Tower: New & Selected Poems is available from NewSouth Books, Amazon, or your favorite local or online bookstore.