Poetry from Eddie Gibbons

This week, Notes From the Blunder Ground is honoured to feature three poems by the Liverpool-born poet Eddie Gibbons, who has been living in deepest Aberdeenshire since 1980. Eddie is a time-served toolmaker and works as  a design draughtsman and media designer. He is a founder member and chairman of Aberdeen's Lemon Tree Writers.
 Eddie's work is often humorous, sometimes very moving, and frequently both at once - no mean feat for a writer of poetry or prose.

Eddie has kindly provided a commentary for each of the poems featured here, explaining something of their genesis and providing a little insight into his own writing values and process. So with no more ado, I'll hand this blog over to Eddie.

Eddie Gibbons

A NORTHERN LAD

He lives inside a Lowry landscape:

red brick, smoke and snow.

Black hail falls in solid shapes:

asphalt, coke and crow.

He walks among the brittle people

making tracks inside the cold.

Worn-out souls below the steeple

praise the god of coal.

Here blood is rain dyed red,

breath is specked with soot.

The bending back, the bowing head,

the constant aching in the gut.

Grey skies drift behind their eyes,

against grim towers of steel and flame.

All their lives they swallow lies.

 No-one gets to leave the frame.

This is an autobiographical poem from my forthcoming collection Roughly Speaking to be published by Leamington Books, Edinburgh, later this year.  Although Lowry painted in Pendlebury, near Manchester, his scenes, both rural and industrial, were typical of the whole of the North of England. Anyone who ever worked in a factory could readily relate to his bleak canvases. His style is described as naïve, but he wasn’t as naïve as the people in his paintings. He was a debt collector. His subjects spent their lives working to hand over their wages to people such as him. I did eventually get to leave the frame, following the seemingly endless drudgery of my teenage years hunched over factory machines. I escaped to the relatively luxurious drudgery of office life.

QUESTION AND ANSWER

I sit on my mat and pray to the Lord

To end my days in the sweetness of home,

Far from this place that has no name for love.

Whatever the question, the answer is blood.

My life was a kite but now it’s a stone.

My hands are held fast, my skull is a cave.

Each day the footsteps come down from above.

Whatever the question, the answer is blood.

This darkness is constant, my thoughts are grave.

Each minute is vast - an infinite dome.

I dreamt of a hawk devouring a dove.

Whatever the question, the answer is blood.

The days of the world have raged and moved on:

My wife is now old, the children have grown.

I raised my voice - met a fist in a glove.

Whatever his question, my answer is blood.

This is my response to a request last year for a poem for Amnesty International. It is obviously a work of pure imagination. They say write what you know, but often it’s instructive to write what you don’t know, by trying to picture yourself in an unfamiliar situation. If the poem has any power at all it is delivered through the repetition of the final line in each stanza. It’s one of the few poems in which I’ve capitalised the first letter of each line. It just seems to suit that form.

EVERY DAY HAS ITS DOG

I take the lead: I take his lead.

Up the garden path he leads me

in kind or in inclement weather.

I wonder as we wander, whether

he thinks: All this because he feeds me.

He navigates the course I set, past

pavement slabs and picket fencing:

past trilby, parka, hoodie, burka;

my horizontal mountain’s Sherpa,

his calm demeanour stops me tensing.

I bring my stick. I never throw it.

He sticks to our routine. The route?

He’ll know it like the back of his paws.

Back on the street his presence draws

every synonym of cute.

He breaks the ice, slips me into conversations

with people in bus stops, people in parks:

strangers from the seeing world who say,

 (caringly, considerately, without a hint of irony),

I should go home before it gets dark.

A poem requested for an anthology for Guide Dogs for the Blind. Most of my recent poems have been written on request from editors of anthologies. I find this quite useful when I’m short of my own ideas for poems. Having a topic handed to you is often challenging, and therefore more rewarding if you complete it to your own satisfaction and that of the editor. As for the readers, well, the readers  take final ownership of the poem and do whatever they like with it.

 Publications

Zugzwang (with Robert Guzder), published by Koo Press, Aberdeen.

Three-Way Street (with Gerard Rochford and Douglas Gray), Koo Press, Aberdeen.

Stations of the Heart, (1999). The Republic of Ted (2003). Game On!, (2006), Thirsty Books.

Why She Flew to Barcelona, Calder Wood Press, 2010.

What They Say About You, Leamington Books, 2010. (Shortlisted for the Poetry Section, Scottish Book of the Year Awards, 2011.)

A Twist of Lime Street, Red Squirrel Press, 2013.

Roughly Speaking - New & Rejected Poems, Leamington Books, Paper version to be published Autumn 2015.