With the publication this week of her latest collection, "The Glass Globe," Preston resident and Connecticut Poet Laureate Margaret Gibson completes a profound and moving trilogy of books that started with 2014's "Broken Cup" and continued in 2018's "Who Hears the Wood Thrush."

At the core of these works are real-time poems, reflections and observations that chronicle the diagnosis of her husband, the writer David McCain, with Alzheimer's Disease; the progression of the illness; and his passing. The work is astonishingly moving in its beauty and craft — swirling, gorgeous and evocative — and similarly profound in the cumulative sense of Gibson's own intertwined explorations of love and grief. Ultimately, the works skillfully and almost frighteningly reflect our tenuous and symbiotic connection to the natural world.

Gibson has several readings and events scheduled to coincide with the publication of "The Glass Globe." She appears today as part of a virtual collective reading via Zoom for the "Waking Up to the Earth: Connecticut Poets in a Time of Global Climate Crisis" initiative and on Sept. 26 at the latest in the Arts Café Mystic poetry and music series.

Last week, Gibson responded by email to questions about the new book, the trilogy, and her increasing concerns about and connections to ecology and the planet. The answers have been edited for space and clarity.

Q: "The Glass Globe" completes a most astounding trilogy. Did you know, even working on "Broken Cup," there would be a trilogy? Was there a finite goal that you would explore grief and loss and love — with respect to David — wherever it would take you, no matter how long? Or was the goal a heartfelt exercise in therapy to be completed in one book, only to learn you couldn't set limits to the exercise?

A: I generally write any poem that seems worth its salt with the attitude that I'll stay with it, no matter how long. There's a saying that no poem is ever finished; it's simply abandoned. "Broken Cup" concluded with a poem that imagined how David would be when it was his time to die. At the time, he was still in the early to middle stages of Alzheimer's, and his death was, thankfully, years away. After the onset of his illness and our adjustments to it, it took two years before I was able to write a poem.

When I began writing again — one poem after another, and not necessarily in the order that they'd eventually take in the book — David was at home with me, and he often read and re-read them. When I finished that book, I thought that was it. But life, and Alzheimer's, is long.

Q: Is it fair to say that each book in the trilogy explores a specific part of the chronology?

A: Yes, as it turned out, the three books follow the periods of David's illness as it progressed, so that what became a trilogy reflects the three different stages of David's illness, and my grief after his death.

During the years that "Broken Cup" chronicles, David was living at home. When I was writing the poems for "Not Hearing the Wood Thrush," I was alone at home, visiting David daily at memory care and later at the nursing home. That second book focuses on my work to transform my loneliness into a creative solitude. At that time, I wrote numerous poems addressed to "No one," poems that were something like prayers. And then after David's actual death, during those early winter months, I wrote poems of personal bereavement, assembling them along with poems about climate emergency and environmental grief, so that in "The Glass Globe," the personal and the global are intertwined and reflect each other.

Perhaps something in me was taking notes and making plans for a trilogy, but I wasn't aware of that. All along, I was writing without a goal. I wasn't writing as an exercise in therapy.

When the river of life is running deep, when there are challenges that stir you to consider how life and death unfold intimately and directly within oneself, it's only natural to ride the currents, to try to be as aware as possible of the great mystery revealing itself, moment by moment, poem by poem, and, as it turns out, book by book.

Q: Much of your work is spent working tirelessly on behalf of the planet. I know you and David loved Nature and your home within its woods and wetlands in Preston. It's gratifying and moving how that love is reflected in these new poems. Is that because there is no way to write about David and you without addressing that? And do you ever have to step back and "govern" yourself, because you don't want activism to tilt the emotional balance of any given poem?

A: I have always written poems about the Nature, or the living world, whether I was using Nature imagery to clarify the inner life of mind and heart, or whether I was writing about the living world for its own sake. Before David's death, I was beginning more consciously to write poems about climate crisis. I was "at home" in that subject perhaps because I live off road, in the woods, and my nearest neighbors are birds, coyote, owls, bull frogs, dragonflies and an occasional bobcat. (And, yes, some lovely humans not too far away.)

Because David and I lived for decades in this place, I know it in my bones. It feels as if the woods and wetlands live through me as much as I live within them.

Activism? It's important to recognize climate emergency and to speak up. So much is at stake, as is becoming daily and tragically clear. Poetry is intimately persuasive. And activism can be verbally gentle, not strident; activism includes the heart and mind waking up from delusions of safety, waking up to our interdependence with all beings, not just human beings. Let's call it an inner activism; and for that, a less strident and certainly a more intimate language is called for.

It's odd how we human people tend to think that Nature affects us — and it does; but it works both ways. We also affect it by our daily actions, both social and political. But since poems don't articulate policy, your question is really about not letting the language of the protest rally or the policy wonk take over the poem. The advocates of Deep Ecology believe that we humans are the voice for the planet Earth. But what sort of voice shall we use? To speak most effectively in poetry, heart and mind must come together in an intimate unity. In Chinese, the word for heart and for mind are the same. At its best, any poem speaks in a voice that clarifies and penetrates, that informs and energizes.

Q: Can you look on the trilogy as a whole and talk about how you feel now? Did you achieve what you'd hoped for? Did you learn things that were perhaps revelatory?

A: While grief is the "steady pulse" audible throughout this trilogy, let's remember that grief is only one of the measures of what is immeasurable: love. Love is immeasurable, boundless — but love can only be delved and felt through experiential, humble, often small details, moments of memory that have presence, present moments that widen out to include all that is.

There's a poem in "The Glass Globe," "One Hour," in which the speaker of the poem is outside her house at night, looking at the night sky, the lights inside the house falling in gold rectangles on the dark grass. It's my home in the woods, the place that anchored my marriage with David. But after his death, as the speaker says, "I don't know in what direction to call your name." Death displaces. The poem also remembers watching an eclipse of the moon from that house, our seeing the Earth's shadow move across the face of the moon — a moment during which my late husband said, "I'm glad to be here, and with you."

And isn't that what we most want? To be with someone you love, glad to be here, glad to be withed?

But it's also essential to notice that in this poem, as in our lives, the personal and the planetary are coupled. There is no personal life without this Earth. To live fully, we must be anchored to each other and to the Earth.

I mention this poem because it enacts what many other poems in "The Glass Globe" enact. The poems take daily detail — the ordinary memory, the ordinary word, the ordinary silence of the moment — and then link these to what is universal, revelatory, vast.

If you truly love even one thing, one person, you have had a taste of what it is to love without measure. That said, it's hard enough to imagine the death of someone you love; it's even harder to imagine the death of this Earth. But that is exactly the task that global climate crisis sets for us. The poems in "The Glass Globe" offered me — and they offer the readers of these poems — a chance to participate by imagination in love and care-giving that widens out to include the Earth itself.

Q: "The Glass Globe" begins and ends with poems that respectively reflect both literal and metaphorical acts of cleansing. It has a remarkable effect on the reader and provides a sense of closure. Talk about those poems.

A: "The Glass Globe" begins with a poem called "Washing the Body," which focuses on the moment of tending David's body for the last time — a moment that is brief, yet so very resonant. And the book ends with "Irrevocable," a poem that "washes" the body of the Earth.

The intent of that ministration to the earth is to awaken us, small detail by detail, to how much we stand to lose, how much we now must love: each other, this Earth. That's my mantra now: Each other, this Earth. And yes, writing the poems in this trilogy led me (again and again) to the revelation that there is no separation between personal and planetary, between human and other sentient beings. There is this one Life we're part of, and it asks for our care, our respect, our love.

If you go

Who: Connecticut poet laureate Margaret Gibson

What: Reads from her latest collection, "The Glass Globe," along with poets Jon Andersen, Dolores Hayden and Jose Gonzalez. "The Glass Globe" is part of the "Waking Up to the Earth: Connecticut Poets in a Time of Global Climate Crisis" initiative in connection with the museum's exhibit of sculpture by Ana Flores, "Forest Dreaming."

When: Virtually via Zoom at 2 p.m. today from New London's Kyman Allyn Museum.

To access program: Register at https://www.lymanallyn.org/events-2/waking-up-to-the-earth

How much: Free

What: Gibson headlines Arts Cafe Mystic with musical guests The Rivergods

When: Live and outdoors at 4 p.m. Sept. 26

Where: Mysic Art Museum, 9 Water St., Mystic

How much: $15

For more information: artscafemystic.org