Need-Fire

Author: Becky Gould Gibson
Publisher: Bright Hill Press
ISBN: 978-1-892471-42-0 and 9 781892 471420

"Need-Fire is a gripping story revolving around the 7th -century Hild, who became the first abbess on the cold, wild Northumberland coast at Whitby. Little is known about her life, aside from the scant pages granted her in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. The poet has undertaken the Herculean effort of giving Hild a voice, in a language we may recognize as authentically reflective of her times. The result is a rich, strange, rough- hewn book, unlike anything I have read this year -- indeed, perhaps unlike anything I have ever read. Therein lies part of its magic and charm. Composed of blunt Ango-Saxon words, in a loose version of the Old English half-line, Need-Fire has a powerful stark music and a compelling story to tell. From the moment of Hild’s birth to years after her death, Need-Fire charts the journey of one woman’s extraordinary life. It never stumbles in its commitment to the story. --Liz Rosenberg, Awards Judge "Only one who was a meticulous scholar as well as a bold and visionary could have written this book . . . . Gibson . . . rescued Hild from the silent set of historical facts that has made up her identity in the past, and presented her as the woman she must have been." --Marie Boroff "We are in Gibson’s debt for this intense, colorful, entertaining portrait of the 7th century . . . . These spare, vivid poems awake us to a fresh understanding of Hild’s legacy, to truths we had forgotten that we know." --Robert Morgan Becky Gould Gibson’s Need-Fire is a prodigious feat of historical imagination: through the lost voices of extraordinary women, she ‘speaks [a] world/ into being,’ echoing the great heave and heart-beat of Anglo-Saxon strong stress verse.  Like the bones in the magic reliquary of Gibson’s language that speak in the saga’s final lines, these poems ‘know life to the marrow.’ --Eleanor Wilner