Gibbons Ruark

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Gibbons Ruark (born 1941) is a contemporary American Poet. Known for his deeply personal often elegiac lyrics about his native North Carolina and beloved Ireland, Ruark has had poetry in such publications as The New Yorker, The New Republic, and Poetry. His collections include Rescue the Perishing, Small Rain, Keeping Company, Reeds, A Program for Survival, and, most recently, Passing Through Customs: New and Selected Poems. He was won numerous awards including including three Poetry Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Pushcart Prize.

1 Early Years
2 University of Delaware
3 Poetry
4 Currently
5 Poem Links
6 Bibliography
7 External Links

[edit] Early Years

Gibbons Ruark was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, the son of a methodist minister. When he was nine years old, his mother was hospitalized with a severe case of Polio, an incident which he writes about in several poems. He was brought up in various towns in North and South Carolina and in 1963 graduated from the University of North Carolina. That same year, he moved to Amherst, Massachussetts. Initially working as a bus boy in at the Lord Jeffery Inn, he eventually earned a master’s degree from University of Massachussetts. While a student there, he took a poetry workshop with Joe Langland and became friends the poets Michael Heffernan and Robert Francis.

[edit] University of Delaware

Having begun to publish poems in the mid 1960s, Ruark was hired at the University of Delaware in 1968 to replace the poet Robert Huff who had departed the previous year. It was at Delaware that Ruark first met James Wright, the Pulitzer Prize winning Ohio poet. After the publication of Ruark's Keeping Company, James Wright remarked that he considered Ruark "one of the best formalists now writing in English." Ruark’s poetry conitinues to be compared to Wright's. The two remained close friends until Wright's death in 1980. In addition to Wright, Ruark became well aquainted with a number of other distinguished poets at the University of Delaware, such as W.D. Snodgrass who taught there until 1995 and reknowned neoformalist Marilyn Nelson.

[edit] Poetry

Ruark’s first book of poetry A Program for Survival was published in 1971 and received warm critical reviews. In the mid 1970s, Ruark spent a number of summers in Italy, which provided him with material for many of the poems in his next two books, Reeds in 1978 and Keeping Company in 1983. In 1978, Ruark met the Irish novelist Benedict Kieley who was visiting the University of Delaware for a term. Later that year he visited Ireland for the first time. He returned to Ireland many times and befriended the Nobel Prize winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney. The influence of Ireland can be seen in much of Ruark’s poetry in the late 1980s and Irish subject matter is especially prevalent in many of the poems in his 1991 Rescue the Perishing. In the 1990s Ruark continued to write and teach at the University of Delaware. Passing Through Customs an edition of his selected poems was published in 1999.

[edit] Currently

Recently Ruark's poetry has been selected to appear in a number of anthologies. His poem "Vacant Lot" appeared in The Pushcart Book of Poetry: The Best Poems from 30 Years of the Pushcart Prize, and five of his poems appeared in The Book of Irish American Poetry, From the 18th Century to the Present. Ruark retired from the University of Delaware in 2006, returning to Raleigh, North Carolina where he currently lives with his wife Kay.