Poet Gibbons Ruark to Give Reading On Campus

As part of the Visiting Writers Lecture Series, Gibbons Ruark will give a reading on Oct. 27 at 7:30 p.m. in Levis Browsing Room (Dinand Library). The event, previously scheduled for Oct. 13, is free and open to the public.

Gibbons Ruark’s poems have appeared widely for nearly 40 years in magazines like Ploughshares, The New Republic, the New Yorker and Poetry, and in various anthologies and texts. They have also won him frequent awards, including three poetry fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and a Pushcart Prize. He has published six previous volumes of poems, A Program for Survival (1971), Reeds (1978), Keeping Company (1983), Small Rain (1984), Forms of Retrieval (1989), and Rescue the Perishing (1991), and his seventh and most recent book is Passing Through Customs: New and Selected Poems (1999).

X.J. Kennedy says of Passing Through Customs, "you would have to sift through the life's work of a great many poets to find another hundred pages nearly as fine as these." Edward Hirsch says Ruark is the poetic heir to Edward Thomas and James Wright. Elizabeth Spires writes that Passing Through Customs " reacquaints the reader with what has been too often lost to contemporary poetry — the ceremony and music of the occasion. Ruark is the sage 'singing master' that Yeats imagined inhabiting Byzantium." Ruark recently retired from teaching at the University of Delaware.