Labors In Vineyards Of Desire

“Labors in Vineyards of Desire is a grand, sweeping chronicle of our time, filled with particulars transcendent and mundane, questioned and understood in light of the poet’s astonishing erudition and ferocious appetite for life. Gibbons entertains nearly every version of each of our era’s events, refracting them through the intensely personal prism of his learning and his longing…I believe it is a masterpiece of autobiography.” -Richard Hoffman, author of the memoirs Half the House and Love and Fury

“Robert Gibbons' Labors is something like the story of ethics of writing. The term may sound pretentious, a typical academic's line, and maybe unsuited to the directness and honesty of the author's style. But the term is apposite as we read a voice trying to analyze or weigh up the choices, sacrifices, struggles that get you to be a writer.” -Ben Bollig, Oxford University, Modern Argentine Poetry: Displacement, Exile, Migration

“I think Gibbons has written a very important book, the likes of which we don't often encounter today; indeed, the likes of which is practically unknown in a tragically post-literate time such as ours. Though modernist, even postmodernist in conception, it is also an old fashioned book, a book about a writer’s formation, much as Pasternak's Safe Passage was. I can't think of such a book having been written in the US in recent years.”-Peter Anastas, A Walker in the City: Elegy for Gloucester

“In this remarkable memoir Robert Gibbons weds lucid prose about his past to the poetry of contemporary life. Gibbons recalls with insight, honesty, and humor the physical, spiritual, and intellectual journeys he undertook as he wrote his way across the late twentieth and on into the twenty-first century.” -Charles Brock, Curator of American and British Paintings, National Gallery of Art, author of Charles Sheeler: Across Media