The Garden of Earthly Delights Book of Ghazals ranges across time and place in visiting personal as well as historical and even imagined experience. As an abecedarian was once used to teach the basics of a thing-say, to recognize an alphabet-Gibson, who has labelled his collection a "scrambled abecedarian," suggests that all meaning arises out of disorder. However, it is from this disorder that the varied subjects of the poems, controlled by a single form comprising the collection, are shaped into a significance, whether that significance is to record a life at its start, or at its conclusion. In Praise of the Garden of Earthly Delights Book of Ghazals, For decades now, through five award winning books, Stephen Gibson has been writing poems that rage against the malevolence of man and nature, but nowhere is his fury more concentrated than in The Garden of Earthly Delights Book of Ghazals. A kind of literary adaptation of Hieronymus Bosch's famous painting, the collection expresses a nightmare landscape of cruelty, ignorance., and enmity; a circus of horrors ranging through serial murderers and war-time atrocities to the more personal wounds of a childhood exploded in the collateral damage of war. In this scrambled abecedarian, Gibson works with the demanding form of the ghazal. Here he is, as he has always been, a master craftsman, a poet who revels in the power of precisely controlled language to contain unwieldy emotions.

The ghazal, with its required repetition of end words and rhyme schemes, provides the cage necessary to contain this much anger "for past-life injuries, for ancestral curses, for spells cast on me, for the god I disappointed and disown". Yet underneath all the fury at all the travesties visited in these poems, there is also the poet himself his voice spent calling attention to our endless barbarity, and in so doing lamenting the failure of compassion, love, justice, and kindness. Book jacket.