Collected Poems
John Gibbens

Touched Press, London, 2000.
ISBN 978-0-9539153-0-9.
560pp, 110x180mm paperback. £12

A gathering of more than 20 years’ work, most of it published here for the first time.

Some of the poems:

• To a Civilian Casualty
• Double Bass
• Of Katharine Hepburn
• To the Bicycle
• A Jazz Lullaby
• Of Bob Dylan
• Film of the First War’s Shell-Shocked
• Sitting Still
• In Memory of Bob Marley
  

If you care about English language poetry and want to discover one of this generation’s best poets ahead of the crowd, buy this book.’
Tony Grist, New Hope International Review
(The whole review can be read at: http://www.nhi.clara.net/bs0326.htm)

‘… poems that have appeared in everything from Agenda to the London Review of Books suggest a lover of mankind, at home with plants and children, with aspirations to know God, seeking and even finding some kinds of peace. “Traditional”, yes, and decent, but contemporary.’
Herbert Lomas, Ambit

‘A magnificent book’
Michael Horovitz

‘I can do little else but heap praise on Gibbens for his impeccable diction and use of language which holds surprises round every corner and is never at ease with the easy.’
John Mingay, Stride

Sample: 10 pages from the section Praises can be viewed as a pdf. The table of Contents, as a pdf, gives an idea of book’s range and diversity.
NB: you need Acrobat Reader (which is available free) to read these files.
Our calendar of poems, Lay for the Day, is largely drawn from this collection.

More about the author

Go to the Trading Post to buy Collected Poems

From Praises:

14. Of the Book

Which though small is the largest of works,
like the soul, in neither time nor space;
whose beginning and end co-exist,
occult from nature, contiguous
with life, and ours to perceive alone;
never read by the same person twice;

Which is not the thing that bears its name,
the flammable, fragile, speckled sheaf
of leaves, but what arises from them,
sublimated, in presence of mind;
which has neither form, colour, motion,
smell, sound, flavour, duration nor place;

Which modifies the pulse and habit
of the hands that hold and open it.