Old Orchard’s Palace: Where the Cacophony of Summer Cascades into the Silence of Winter

This collection is a sequel to Gibbons’s earlier volume Old Orchard Beach Cycle. As in Cycle, the poet again takes us with him on his daily walks along the streets and beaches of Maine’s most famous vacation town, Old Orchard Beach, with its pier, arcade, and amusement park, Palace Playground. Observing, interacting and ruminating, Gibbons records his experiences in poems that are filled with joy, amusement, intelligence, pathos, and love.

Praise for Old Orchard Beach Cycle:

Again and again through this collection, poems conclude on a certain uplift of immediate consciousness… the kind of illumination we find in the poetry of many mystics… I spent my readings of Old Orchard Beach Cycle feeling Robert Gibbons’ walks around Old Orchard, getting the same glimpses, if not the profound religious revelations of Rumi or St Francis, nonetheless glints glowing out of the same experiential disposition – everyday winking epiphanies of reality, in nature, people, pens, memories and conditions of light. W.B. Yeats described how whole civilizations are built or lost on the presence or absence of the very kind of ancient, glittering gaiety found here.

–    Dana Wilde, Kennebec Journal