London Bride by John Gibbens

"A visionary journey evoking London by turns as Babylon and Jerusalem, London Bride is born of this city's bone and marrow. Standing on the shoulders of Blake, Eliot and Joyce, Gibbens' poetry is deliciously playful intensely musical and, in short a psycho-geographical masterpiece." – Helen Moore

"John Gibbens was a reticent poet largely uninterested in reputation, but he was one of the finest, right there in the tradition of London visionaries. He is inter alia a poet of urban landscape. His eye for detail is superb; his critique of wealth, power and architecture as visible politics, exacting; his scope ranging from tiny flower to geologic speed.

William Blake is close to him, John Clare too, and David Jones. He died far too young. 'London Bride', the long sequence that rounds off and titles this book, places him firmly and well among the great poets of contemporary London." – Stephen Watts

"John Gibbens never stood a chance. This poet, who had won a prestigious prize as a young poet and been asked to contribute to a Faber Introduction poetry collection, went underground instead and remained there. But so deeply underground that few other poets knew his work. Why? Because there was no other place, and that's what's so sad and so splendid about John. Many of us don't fit in with the increasingly ridiculous factions that constitute British Poetry. John was largely oblivious of them, as they were of him. It was their misfortune. John Gibbens, salud!" – David Miller