The poet Robert Gibbons might be best described as a working man’s flâneur, the French term for “stroller” or “saunterer,” but one who, like Baudelaire and Thoreau before him, transforms his movements into meditations.

Gibbons has explored the streets of Boston and Portland (as well as Paris but not as extensively), and now, in his most recent book, “Old Orchard Beach Cycle,” the streets, sands and piers of his adopted hometown, which, he says, “holds me in its thrall.”

The author of 21 previous books and/or chapbooks and holder of 50-plus jobs, including one at the National Gallery of Art Library in Washington, D.C., Gibbons is probably best known for his prose poems, many collected into the volumes “This Time, Traveling Companion” and “To Know Others, Various and Free,” published by Nine Point Publishing in Bridgton.

His work has been praised by Danish scholar Bent Sørensen, poet William Heyen and biographer John Felstiner, among many others, including former Maine poet laureate Betsy Sholl, who commented about this book, “These poems are wide-ranging and luminous. In our current troubled, deceitful world, Robert Gibbons has given us a necessary guide to living an embodied and examined life.”

Gibbons is adamant that our experience of the world comes through our senses, but that this experience must be examined. What he sees as he walks along the sands and streets of Old Orchard Beach and environs, often accompanied by his wife, Kathleen (“Proximity to her is a joy/I don’t ever take for granted,” he writes in “Souls across the River Styx”) must be examined, thought about, wrestled with and sung into poems.

These reflections consist of Gibbons making connections or, as he has said in one of his prose poems, “correspondences.” What Gibbons connects are his thoughts about literature and art, memories of friends and foreign countries, and profound learning in archaeology and history, with what he sees on his walks.

Or, as in “Exile of Voronezh,” with what he sees when he wakes up in his house in the middle of the night during a storm: “Through the skylight/I praised the roof & rain itself.”

But he’s thinking about the Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938), who Stalin exiled with his wife, Nadezhda, to Voronezh in southwestern Russia. Mandelstam says they lived in “a real house” but his wife said they “lived/in nothing but/ hovels.”

Prefaced with a quote from Mandelstam – “Storms are good for you, poetry!” – the poem goes on to say:

Nadezhda says the cages they found
themselves in failed to diminish
her husband’s gaiety.

Just south of the equal latitudes
of Warsaw & Berlin, nonetheless,
you don’t want the exile of Voronezh.

Gibbons praises the rainstorm and Mandelstam’s valiant spirit, but, like most of us, he’d rather not have to go through what Mandelstam did.

There are less fraught connections in his poem “At the Corner of Haigis Parkway & Lincoln Ave.”

‘Nothing is ever lost,’ says the Fool
in Fellini’s La Strada, which echoes from
childhood whenever I see the stand of rushes
at the corner of Haigis Parkway & Lincoln Ave.
as we pass by on Route 1 in Scarborough just before
the Downs Racetrack wondered about so often
as a kid when we summered in Biddeford
& the Carousel’s wooden horses
were the only ones I knew.

Another example of Gibbons’ connections between places and thoughts comes in “Ferris Wheel Mandala,” which I quote in full:

First thing you get here, even if it takes
seven months, is the Ferris Wheel
as Mandala of Life
& Afterlife,
whether it’s static
in winter, or turning come spring & summer,
the Circle of Day & Night Moment-by-Moment.

Silence’s Hurdy-Gurdy …

Gibbons’ poems are reminiscent of Jack Kerouac’s and in many ways carry on the tradition of the Beat school, emphasizing experience, community and a search for the divine. “Any record of my life,” Gibbons says, “can’t be done without alluding to others, people, places, things, events. I view my work as a transcription of immediate experience.”

The book is well-crafted, with gold-colored endpapers and a section of color photographs of Old Orchard Beach sights. But what stays with one are the words of a wonderful poet, such as in “Talismanic Stone”:

On my walk
I lost track
of Time.

At Time’s return
I’d found my place
within the vast
Universe, finally
at this age, resembling
a single grain
of sand.

Frank Freeman is a poet and book reviewer who writes from Saco. 

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