Download PDF Here
Live Encounters Books-Reviews Volume Seven
November- December 2025
Watchman in the Knife Factory:
New and Selected Poems, by David Rigsbee
Black Lawrence Press, 2024
Like many poets who came of age in the 1970s, I was eager to see my work in book form. My first collection, Stamping Ground (1976), appeared in hardback and paperback through the kind recommendation of Joseph Brodsky and received generous reviews. Looking back nearly fifty years later while assembling Watchman in the Knife Factory: New and Selected Poems, I decided not to include any poems from that debut. Though it was the seedbed of later work, it lacked what I came to value most in others—the transformation of private experience into public expression. The idea for this book began as a thought: what about a “collected poems”? I had published twelve full-length collections, most now out of print. But as I began compiling everything, the manuscript swelled to more than six hundred pages. My editor at Black Lawrence Press wisely reminded me that such a tome would be hard to promote. A close poet friend of my generation added that “selected poems”—like those of Lucille Clifton or Richard Hugo—are far more likely to be read and carried around than a poet’s “brick.” Carolyn Kizer once said that a poet’s collected is “a tombstone,” and I took that remark as cautionary. In the end, I chose a middle way: a new and selected that represented the full arc of my career while leaving out poems that no longer resonated. The resulting collection gathers poems that have first appeared in literary journals for over half a century, some rescued from out-of-print volumes, as well as new, previously uncollected, poems. I think of it as a life report, culminating in James Wright’s tender aspiration to offer “the poems of a grown man.”
“The cumulative effect of this massive collection is a lived sense of why one might care so much about this world, as flawed and wonderful as it is.”
— Bill Tremblay, Rain Taxi
“There is so much in this collection that should be lauded and we have limited space to do so, but moving from the first page to the last is a type of reverse engineering “There is so much in this collection that should be lauded and we have limited space to do so, but moving from the first page to the last is a type of reverse engineering of a poet’s mastery that we so rarely see anymore. Each page is vital. No word is unnecessary. These are poems written with a musician’s ear, an editor’s eye, a philosopher’s mind, and a poet’s heart, poet’s mastery that we so rarely see anymore. Each page is vital. No word is unnecessary. These are poems written with a musician’s ear, an editor’s eye, a philosopher’s mind, and a poet’s heart
— Shawn Pavey, Cultural Daily
For decades now, David Rigsbee has crafted poems of a bracing lyrical intensity that is both refined and tough-minded. They celebrate the blessings and consolations of a cultured life, one that can honor Auden and Roy Orbison, Faust, and one-hit doo-wop groups. These elegant and lovingly constructed poems deserve to be read and—more importantly—reread.
— David Wojahn
As a fine poet and a fine translator, he is the closest thing to a potential Renaissance man that I’ve encountered in my career: intellectually brilliant, highly creative, and emotionally mature.
— Carolyn Kizer
Rigsbee walks us through our past and present even as he points us toward the future. The world that awaits will be a beautiful one as long as it contains poets and poems like these.
— David Kirby
David Rigsbee keeps us with him at every step, whether in awe of his talent or nurtured by his insights. It is rare to pass through more than two or three pages without being punched in the gut or hugged by some greater, more understanding arm.
— Carolyne Wright
David Rigsbee does not promise mending, but persists with voice and eye in the work of connection.
— Sarah Lindsay
Rigsbee’s poems offer as premise and example a sensibility at once tautly responsible and generous.
— Jordan Smith
David Rigsbee’s poems chart the shifting geographies, the oceanic flux, of the human spirit. Like the maps of master cartographers, they engage the world while leading us toward vast privacies, what remains nameless.
— Michael Waters
Rigsbee’s poems are, above all else, quests. They are searches for meaning and endless haunts for an explanation, and they look not with envy but with grief at the more uncomplicated forms—flies, bears, tulips, sustaining their
own lives. His poems are stubbornly honest and delicate, and I am moved by them.
— Gerald Stern
This is the voice of the American southern raconteur—musical, thoughtful, discursive, political. I’m drawn to the honesty of its unhurried recollections and its steady intelligence to its longings and angers and the twinkle in its eye.
— Dorianne Laux
Few other poets so powerfully capture both the ignorant cruelty and profound love we bear one another.
— Peter Makuck
Rigsbee’s tensile imagination takes on an air of achievement through the very strength and energy with which he makes the poem move.
David Rigsbee is the recipient of many fellowships and awards, including two Fellowships in Literature from The National Endowment for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Humanities (for The American Academy in Rome), The Djerassi Foundation, The Jentel Foundation, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, as well as a Pushcart Prize, an Award from the Academy of American Poets, and others. In addition to his twelve collections of poems, he has published critical books on the poetry of Joseph Brodsky and Carolyn Kizer and coedited Invited Guest: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Southern Poetry. His work has appeared in Agni, The American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, The New Yorker, The Southern Review, and many others. Main Street Rag published his collection of found poems, MAGA Sonnets of Donald Trump in 2021. His translation of Dante’s Paradiso was published by Salmon Poetry in 2023, and Watchman in the Knife Factory: New & Selected Poems was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2024. https://blacklawrencepress.com/
