“Insightful. . . .  [Gibbons] is brilliant on the role of allusion and etymology in poetry; his observations on metrics are lively rather than scholastic; and his choices of examples are brilliant. This volume will enrich the experience of poetry for readers and writers of the art. . . . Highly recommended.”

Choice

“Demands attention to technique across the ages and, crucially, across languages.”

Nation

“Rich, conversational and enjoyable. . . . An insightful, sometimes moving reflection on poetry’s potential capacities.”

Times Literary Supplement

“I’m fascinated by [Gibbons’s] discussion of the metaphysics of languages and the ways in which English, with its massive and particularizing vocabulary, enables different modes of thinking and feeling than, say, the Platonic idealism expressed by French. . . . Gibbons’s book is a bright star in the firmament of my current reading.”

Joshua Corey | Poetry Magazine

“A reflective and sophisticated account. . . . [Gibbons’s] comparative approach . . . is highly astute to the different resources and the different resistances offered by different languages.”

Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

“There are so many things to admire in this book: its sound analyses, its wisdom about art’s relation to the psyche, its pioneering work in making other poetic traditions comprehensible to us. But above all else, it is timely. Contemporary ‘accessible’ poetry is impoverished by its ignorance of the dimensions Gibbons explores. Contemporary experimental poetry is aware of them, but, shaped by postmodernist theory, it ignores their roots in the emotions and the unconscious. Poets of whatever school, as well as all who are interested in poetics, will find their horizons expanded by reading this book.”

Modern Philology

“Poking into cobwebby corners, weaving narrative into discourse, using assemblage, How Poems Think is a trove. I read it with a pencil — until I saw that underlining everything was the same as underlining nothing.”

Beverley Bie Brahic | Poetry Magazine

"This is a writers’ book—a must for poets. Poet-critics get at the meaning behind literary forms, and Reginald Gibbons does just that. He analyzes leaps of thought urged by rhymes, metaphors, and lexical choices. Chapters on the translation of Russian and of ancient Greek poetry are dazzling. This enormously readable book is part memoir, part report, part essay—and always conjectural, reaching forward."

Robert von Hallberg, author of Lyric Powers

"From ancient times to the present, poetry has created gods, and gods in turn have sustained poetry. Ranging from Homer, Pindar, and Sappho through French Symbolism and modern Russian to American poetry of our day, Gibbons has composed a hymn of praise to the spell-casting powers of patterned language. This erudite study mingles mysticism, philology, psychoanalysis, and mischief: it should provoke the liveliest arguments around."

Rosanna Warren, author of Ghost in a Red Hat