The Red Tower New & Selected Poems

David Rigsbees poems focus on the relationship between memory and place, self and other, and history and story. The poems record not only the fact that events and experiences bring us to loss, to the Adamic vastnesses, but that their transformation into memory can also uncover occasions for redemptive hope. Rigsbees poemsintensely felt, formally rigorousare grounded in the South and in generations of family. They move through suicide, disease, survival and dementia to the spreading loam of racism, spiritual erosion, and permanently deferred dreams; from the hardscrabble seasons and their too-brief flowerings, to empathy suspended elegiacally over loss, shaping the climate of felt life.