Fresoes

In Frescoes, Stephen Gibson assumes the charge of the engaged tourist, paying his entry fee to the chapels and basilicas of Renaissance Florence and Padua and Rome in order to enter in to much more subversive premises: to see through the pigmented plaster and marble facades to the real-life consequences of original sin and human depravity depicted in these treasures of High Art. Gibson is a wised-up pilgrim in sanctuaries whose faith he cannot share. . . . Harsh and highly accomplished, these poems redeem the people from the paint, plaster and piety. They pull victims and perpetrators alike out of the history and myth of the treasures of Great Arts into the arena of our ongoing moral dilemmas, our struggles for survival as well as for the preservation of compassion and decency in a perennially fallen human world. After reading these poems, we will never again be able to stand before these mysteries of life and death and then, like too many tourists, merely check them off our guidebook¿s must-see list. Stephen Gibson has created a sequence of poems with the same sweep and dimension as the art that inspired them.