The Entertainers

Illuminated poems
by John Gibbens

FORTHCOMING
Expanded 2nd edition

A5, 28pp, stapled, card cover
ISBN 978-1-905465-17-0
£6.00

A celebration of the sawdust and the boards in twelve poems about performers and their presiding spirit – the juggler and the conjuror, the bareback rider, stiltwalker and trapeze artiste, the funambulist and the ventroliquist, Pierrot and Harlequin, the ringmaster and the tragedian, and Hermes. Each poem is accompanied by a linocut – three black & white and eight colour.

Bareback

The waist-high net-clad thighs
and clenched and seam-drawn rump
that swoop before your eyes,
the tasselled basque and deep
décolletage that keep
me barely in, and shown
shaved oxter, arms upthrown,
call for applause when, jump
and somersault complete,
I land on slender feet.
These, as Eros fancies,
should surmount sleek ponies’ dances.
And yet the truth, although you see no horn,
is that I am the Virgin tames the Unicorn.