High Jump as Icarus Story

Gustav Parker Hibbett
(Banshee Press, 2024); pbk, £10.99

Gustav Parker Hibbett’s unusual blend of sports and Greek mythology presents an outstanding debut collection. A black poet, essayist and scholar, Hibbett’s work has previously been published in LitHub, Adroit, London Magazine, Guernica Poetry Ireland Review, to name a few. There’s a real magic to the way Hibbett crafts their narrative. Just like the Icarus story, High Jump as Icarus Story is a narrative of ambition and determination; however, the collection’s strength comes from the ways in which Hibbett pushes beyond the allegory. From the parallels they create, Hibbett carves out their own space to interrogate the theme of identity,: its construction and performativity, and its relation to society. Using references to pop and folk culture, Hibbett contemplates the development of personal and national mythologies, as well as their own experience as a black person growing up in New Mexico and living in Dublin.

The power of Hibbett’s collection is through the way the high jump is mythologized as part of an intricately explored personal journey. Their techniques are varied and affecting. Through various poetic forms ranging from the sonnet, free verse, prose poem, Hibbett renders a collection that is momentous and multifaceted. High jumping in this sense becomes a point of take off; identity is intertwined with meditations on the act of high jumping, and the speaker’s devotion to it. Often, the constraints of identity are juxtaposed with the freedom the speaker feels in the act of jumping, an idea best exemplified in the poem ‘Diversity Statement (500 Words)’:

Hibbett delivers this poem in a border to call attention to the confinement of a performed identity. This is one example of how Hibbett materialises the poem’s structure in relation to the poem’s emotional and thematic contexts. The poem ‘Rococo’ is another example. In this, the reader is taken to a world where the ‘clouds [are] fluffed/ pink/’ and the skies are ‘as sinuous and rolling as they are in fresco’. It is a story of love told in the light and opulent setting of many Rococo paintings. The lack of capitalization negates punctuation and blurs sentences, emulating the delicate blending of colour and the ethereally smooth texture that is characteristic of Rococo paintings. The speaker maps their partner onto the figure of a goddess, building upon the poet’s development of a compassionate personal mythology throughout the collection. In recalling the style and themes of Rococo (a movement known for blending classical mythology, fantasy and reality) in a poetic form, the poem echoes the collection’s propensity to do much the same thing.

A fundamental part of the collection’s post-colonial influence is Hibbett’s reconstructions of pop-culture narratives for their own catharsis. Not only does Hibbett map their experience onto mythological figures as the Minotaur and Grendel, but they also highlight their experience with references to modern narratives as in the poem ‘What I Would Have Wanted Fleabag to Say for Me, Had the Priest Not Brought It Back to Sex’. In this poem, Hibbett’s speaker utilizes the significance of Fleabag’s transgressive and honest voice, and fashions it to tell a story that resonates more with their own journey and experiences. Through doing this, Hibbett develops a voice that is both grounded in personal experience and also in tune with popular culture and its lacklustre representation of relevant experiences.

This collection is a testament to the significance of mythos as a means of rationalizing oneself and the world. As someone with a very limited knowledge on Greek mythology and sports, I still found this collection to be both accessible and deeply engaging. Razor sharp and attentive to its aim of depicting the high jump as Icarus story, Hibbett’s first poetry collection hits the ground running. 

Shannon O’Donnell