Old Love and Present Tense

Margaret Gibson, the state poet laureate of Connecticut from 2019 to 2022, is the author of fifteen books of poetry, including The Vigil, a finalist for the National Book Award. Her honors include the Lamont Poetry Selection, the Melville Kane Award, and two Connecticut Book Awards.

"I've been wondering where the love poems have gone. I don't mean the one or two that pop up here and there. I mean the wild, whitewater rivers of love poems meant to overwhelm with tenderness and outcries of erotic delight. Margaret Gibson's Old Love is one such rambunctious river. Love, especially old love, also means embracing the prospects of loss and perhaps death—both of which are measured poignantly in these pages."—Tim Seibles "Elegant and elegiac, yet celebratory, the poems in Old Love offer a profound meditation on life, death, and the enduring attachments that sustain us—to a lover, the earth, the body, family, and home. Gibson reminds us to pay attention, acknowledge our mortality, and live fully. Despite grief and inevitable loss, joy and gratitude resonate throughout this marvelous collection."—Natasha Trethewey "Present Tense is an exceptional book, in terms of its intellectual sophistication, its subtlety of feeling, its imagistic sharpness, and the heartbreaking beauty embedded in moments of rapture haunted by personal loss."—Bruce Bond "Love and light irradiate the poems of Margaret Gibson, despite the chaos of our time. The penetration of her vision into heartache and illness, anger and ignorance, is knife-like and profound, and yet I come away hopeful for Earth, the planet or body on which we live, and for mankind."—Henri Cole