The second-last step is the mostimportant. There are said to bethose who can tell if someone’sgonna clear their jump just by watchingthe way their body dips, how muchupward force they generate,the angle of their planted knee.It’s crucial, make or break:how you get down governshow you fly; you either leavewith wings or you stay human,decided in the moment just beforethe moment. You take videosof yourself, cut them off beforethe jump, then scramble themso you can’t remember which resulteach run-up led to. Watch your yellowjumping shoes hit the mark againand again, until you blur into a queueof selves in uniform. A tense flutterof shoelaces. Halo of dust dislodged,like a moonwalker. Learn to readthis language like a kind of augur.You’ll either make it or you won’t.
High Jump as Divination
Feature Date
Series
Selected By
Share This Poem
Print This Poem
“High Jump as Divination” from HIGH JUMP AS ICARUS STORY: by Gustav Parker Hibbett.
Published by Banshee Press on July 4th, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Gustav Parker Hibbett.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Gustav Parker Hibbett grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico and currently lives in Dublin, Ireland. Their debut poetry collection, High Jump as Icarus Story (Banshee Press, 2024), won the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, among other honors. Their work is published widely, including in the 2026 Best of the Net anthology. They were the 2025 Commissioned Writer for Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, and they have recently completed a PhD in Literary Practice at Trinity College Dublin.
“These are poems of real grace, poems in which the intellect and form are harmonised and made to move together. Gods and mythic figures provide the relief-work and architecture for a moving exploration of Blackness, the body, philosophy and so much more. Stylish, tender, playful and rigorous all at once, in this collection Parker Hibbett proves themself to be one of our most compelling new voices.”
—Seán Hewitt, author of Open, Heaven
"High Jump as Icarus Story is a brilliant insight into a mind that speaks of what poetry can achieve when completely unharnessed. […] The poems form a quietly fierce and fiercely quiet manifesto for the body: the body morphing, arching, slowing down into perfect form, contorting, leaping, and becoming pure potential. […] Hibbett’s acrobatic collection is a bravura display of poetic dexterity. Elegance – strict control masquerading as simplicity – is this collection’s raison d’être."
—Shalini Sengupta, Magma Poetry
Poetry Daily Depends on You
With your support, we make reading the best contemporary poetry a treasured daily experience. Consider a contribution today.
