Four Quartets Prize | 2025

Like Eliot’s Four Quartets, albeit a quarter of the length and considerably more funny, Dobby Gibson’s “Hold Everything” is a dazzlingly composed and profound meditation on time, persistence, and the kind of transcendence that can fit inside an ordinary human life. In its closely observed yet subtly rendered transition from bleak midwinter (“Outside, branches heavy with snow weigh / their options”) into an ambivalent spring (“the forsythia is spent, / and like us, for the moment, content to be still”), Gibson’s sequence articulates the flow of thought as it reaches for some foothold of significance “in the waking dream / of our lives.” By means of non sequitur, wild metaphor, rim shot–worthy one-liners, quotable aphorisms, and sheer poetic savoir faire, “Hold Everything” gives body to the shifting tracks and complex textures of an idiosyncratic but radically welcoming, representative mind, one that’s prone to entertaining enormous questions in small, contained spaces: An average morning, a suburban home, and the unrhymed, unmetered American sonnet.

And just as Eliot’s sequence reflects on poetry’s timeworn “way of putting it” and its “intolerable wrestling / with words and meanings,” Gibson’s likewise considers the poetic medium’s belatedness and limitations, but does so with so much flair that it makes a strong argument in favor for what it purports to lament: “Poems lie on the table like the cards / of a spent hand. I’m my only master, but I can’t read / my master’s writing.” Simile, polysemy, enjambment—poetic resources of all kinds are marshalled into “Hold Everything,” almost as if to build a showroom of what’s still possible for our old familiar ways, layering the poem’s larger themes and local phrasings, intensifying them, and preparing them to reside forever in the reader’s mind: “I look through my window like a museum guard growing / oblivious to a masterpiece.”

In the end, it might be that the antidote to such obliviousness is what Gibson’s poem is in search of above all else—a procedure for living, for pushing back against “the flat champagne / of our habits.” A means of resistance to the tendency of the act of living to dull our appreciation of being alive. With its wit, grace, wisdom, and openness to chance; with its will to awaken and unbreakable hope, its endless surprises and tireless service to its cause, “Hold Everything” performs one of poetry’s most satisfying magic tricks—it becomes what it sets out to look for.