... a beautiful book full of extraordinary poems. I too am haunted by the stars & nebulas that stream away through Pascal's Abyss. They are all fine poems, but best I like The First Law of Thermodynamics, perhaps because I wish I had written it. -- Kenneth Rexroth

"I brood a lot about Gamov and Sandage and Hoyle... Curved Space. What marvelous/ phrases they have! Red giants, holes in the void." Love, all that holds things together on our human level, can bind too tight. In "..Go Free" a son longs to [hurt] his mother, to free her and himself from the pain and the sleazy technology of her hospital.. In "..Together" an old man in a supermarket, treasuring the few minutes' release from his wife at home, stares "at the small heap of food in the cart/ and thinks-- 'If I could only get her to eat.' As he is moving toward the cashier
it suddenly happens then that he knows
fifty years' love
seeping..
through stunned membranes into his lungs...
Tornado Watch is the first book of a very mature, accomplished poet. --Robert E. McDonough

Wrapped in a striking dust jacket displaying the Great Nebula in Andromeda and partitioned with full-page comet-heads, the book reminds the reader that he inhabits a magnificent, violent universe with which he must strive to become reconciled. In 53 intense poems, Mr. Grigsby deals with human passion, pain, and joy. He speaks, usually in the first person, of both triumphant and disappointing loves, of a ..mother, ..at men's hands and from natural disasters, of the ravages of man-made pollution, of human blindness and hope -- and always of the infinity of the stars. --Wil Margeson

I have the greatest possible respect for the poet who goes his own way, unfashionably, personally, honestly, and that's the way Gordon Grigsby has chosen. The poems are simple in their structure, often craggy in tone, and almost always passionate in their perceptions. If the term cosmic is suspect as used in reference to some, here it is most appropriate, for the poet is sublimely aware of the mysteries, above us and within us, and as in his fine title poem, which ends with a tremendous question, "Now, what shall I do with my life?", the spatial range is extraordinary, is felt, is earned....there are other themes and moods, when we see the poet intensely in love with the earth, compassionately involved in the lives of his fellow humans, so vulnerably part of it...a fully adult volume: no tricks, no currently fashionable modes, no dishonesty. Anyone interested in the possibilities of poetry, of what it can accomplish for the poet and the best of his readers, should read this book. --Lucien Stryk

To the past, Grigsby is beholding and beholden. "Everywhere on earth [he has written,] small farmers disappear, small towns, small tribes. Whole cultures that have endured since the Stone Age vanish in 20 years. The wonderful variety and inwardness of life, rain forests, mountain meadows, African villages, the whole of Tibet: eaten alive by Western ideas, whose true and banal symbol is the bulldozer.... It is the honor of poetry that poets have opposed this for centuries." Grigsby's poems, in praise of what has slipped into darkness, are incantatory but not always celebrative. The tone of his work comes more from the dark side of the moon, where the length of shadows is immeasurable. --George Myers Jr.

Gordon Grigsby has also written Mid-Ohio Elegies and Greatest Hits 1975-2000, Pudding House Publications.