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Praise for The Red Tower "'Silk is a good thing,' hints a friend in one of David Rigsbee's poems, because it forces the admission that 'violence leads to taste.' And taste, if it means the refinement of response which only heightens feeling, is no more and no less than a mode of survival in the interesting times through which the writer of these accomplished and elegant poems has lived. From Mink De Ville to Gil Scott Heron, from a brother's suicide to the tragedy of an industrial fire, from the South of the poet's boyhood to the traveler's Italy and the Russia of the imagination and back again, David Rigsbee's poems offer as premise and example a sensibility at once tautly responsible and generous." "David Rigsbee speaks 'the language of the knife/ sunk in and the cool matter/ of heart coaxed out.' He picks up widely scattered pieces for examination: radishes, doves, a bad painting, a lost brother.... Brooding over objects 'surrounded by chaos, weeds,/ and broken pottery that have given up any sense/ of relationship to the world,' he does not promise mending, but persists with voice and eye in the work of connection." "How intricate and almost fragile is the music of these weighty poems. David Rigsbee gives us stunning moments, he draws us under the deep water. 'Like a good salt citizen I shiver/ at the light's breaking and turn/ to my inward work,' and so we go with him, surprised that such an intelligence, such an ear and eye for the resonant landscape where 'maple ignites like jelly in the frost,' can startle us—we who can no longer be startled—with a tenderness we had nearly forgotten. These are poems to savor, to take in slowly, as the poet, a seeker, asks of himself, 'what could/ He possibly say to them?/ What could He possibly say?'"
Links Read an excerpt from The Red Tower here.
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