Why She Flew to Barcelona Calder Wood Press ISBN: 978-1-9026293-1-5
Why She Flew to Barcelona REVIEWS
Reviews from GEORGE SIMMERS, D.A. PRINCE and ROSS KIGHTLY in Sphinx.
What They Say About You Leamington Books ISBN: 978-0-9554885-1-1
Review by ANNA CROWE
Turning his sidelong, bemused gaze on life, love, and the follies and vagaries of the human condition, Eddie Gibbons is funny, angry, despairing, and wryly hopeful by turns, and always humane. The term 'lateral thinking' might have been invented just to describe Eddie's poetry, which comes at life from totally unexpected angles, and is bursting with exuberance and delight as it plays with words and ideas, catapulting the reader into strange places. He can be formally elegant, devastatingly iconoclastic, and is a master of everything he puts his pen to, whether pastiche or elegiac lyric. Drawing on a rough Liverpool childhood, he plays games and entices us in, always self-deprecating, refusing to take himself seriously, and yet he can be deeply serious and hilarious all at once. He seems more alive than any other poet I know to the endless possibilities of language. His pastiche of 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' is called 'Yeats, Shoots and Leaves' (Lynn Truss, eat your heart out), and begins
I will sit down and stay now, and stay and watch TV and a small pasty eat here, which has been microwaved...
This kind of thing is hard to bring off, yet here he is in 'New Cargoes', doing it again:
Wrinkle cream of Nivea, from distant Oprah, flowing foam of Radox at frothy bathing time,
the vowel patterns replayed through the gleeful, shape-shifting processes of the Gibbons mind.
His deeply affectionate poems about his father during his last illness pull no punches and bring a lump to the throat, and when it comes to childhood, we find that he is the master of melancholy: 'Flower Girls' opens lyrically with memories of his 'aunties, the Flower Girls of Williamson Square' who 'peeked like petunias from under their scarves', and goes on to catalogue the grim vestiges of Liverpool's slave trade, and the terrors invoked by 'the ghosts of Speke Hall...the Witches of Pendle: spectres that drove you to bolt your door.' It ends on a note of bleak, understated realism: And over my shoulder, some thirty miles eastwards, a girl the Echo described as vivacious met someone called Myra while picking flowers on Saddleworth Moor.
For all that he is one of our finest comic writers – or perhaps because of that – he has the clown's vulnerability, the gift of revealing how ineptly we deal with the grimness of life, the dangers of childhood or parenthood, while letting us laugh at our own failures.
What They Say About You REVIEWS
Eddie's poems should be on the Schools National Curriculum. KIRSTY GUNN
He commands an astonishing register and can move from tragic to comic in a dizzyingly short space of time. His writing is always accessible but makes no compromises in terms of depth or technical accomplishment. HELENA NELSON I was delighted by Eddie’s performance of his poems. The changes from sad to happy, from downbeat to zappy, all one enriching tapestry. JOHN HEGLEY
Witty, moving and always ingenious. JENNIE RENTON
…bubbling energy, high wire footwork, and that sense of easy variety that conceals a ton of discipline. The final poem is my new favourite poem about reading – and it includes a vision of nudity in a bookshop... (Read the whole thing, please, you’ve got to, I insist.) LILIAS FRASER (Scottish Poetry Library)
Roughly Speaking REVIEW
"...On the back of the book are the usual accolades alongside letters from magazines declining to publish him, so the game is basically “what did someone else not think good enough”. It is also embellished with his own collage images that ping-pong off the poems... Gibbons is more like the later Byron. The rhymes are brilliantly awful, the wink is perpetual, but it is just as angry and important as Lavery’s book. It is also more experimental. “An Erasure” is an Oulipo experiment that merges conspiracy with randomness. The collage images – Theresa May via Edvard Munch – ought to get him commissions for national newspapers. One poem, “after Tom Waits”, is called “What’s He Writing?”, with the solemn, acerbic lines “I’ll tell you one thing. / He’s not building a career in poetry”. Perhaps he has, in an askance manner. -Stuart Kelly (The Scotsman newspaper)