This weekend sees the final days of an installation, Dazzle at London’s V&A, centred around Wilfrid Gibson’s war poem Suspense. The installation is one of a series inspired by the use of ‘dazzle’ camouflage used to reduce the risks of submarine attacks on shipping in World War One. Suspense draws on Gibson’s own experience of … Continue reading Wilfrid Gibson Dazzles at the V&A with his poem ‘Suspense’
Although poet and feminist Elizabeth Gibson (later Elizabeth Gibson Cheyne), was a prolific writer, publishing some forty books of prose and poetry, her work is very difficult to find. As I discovered doing my own research, there is hardly any publicly available information about her. As a step towards remedying this, I have produced two … Continue reading New in June 2018: A selection of poems by Elizabeth Gibson Cheyne, plus biographical information.
‘1968’ is a fragment from an uncompleted novel by lifelong campaigner for social justice Helen Lowe. It draws on her experiences as a young political activist in nineteen-sixties and seventies London, and opens with an account of the anti Vietnam War demonstration in Grosvenor Square in 1968. When she died in 2011, Helen left behind … Continue reading New in May 2018: 1968 and Grosvenor Square
‘War is a business of innumerable personal tragedies’: Wilfrid Gibson, Elizabeth Gibson Cheyne, and the First World War, published earlier this year in the Journal of the Friends of the Dymock Poets, has now been uploaded and is also available for download in Word and pdf formats.
I have uploaded four more war poems by Wilfrid Gibson and one by Elizabeth Gibson Cheyne. They are among those mentioned in my latest article, ‘”War is a business of innumerable personal tragedies”: Wilfrid Gibson, Elizabeth Gibson Cheyne and the First World War’. (Published this month in Dymock Poets and Friends, No 15, 2016, it … Continue reading New in March 2016: more war poems by Wilfrid Gibson and Elizabeth Gibson Cheyne
Wilfrid Gibson’s poem ‘Devilswater’, set to music by James Gillespie, appears on the recently launched Brothers Gillespie CD, Songs from the Outlands. The poem, which refers to places near Hexham, Gibson’s Northumberland hometown, was influenced by the regional folk tales and Border Ballads he heard from childhood; I think Gibson would have loved the Gillespies’ … Continue reading New in February 2016: Wilfrid Gibson’s ‘Devilswater’
New Upload: ‘Eagle Art Editor’: Michael Gibson’s 1998 illustrated account of his time working for Eagle and associated comics and annuals in the nineteen-fifties. My previous upload of Michael Gibson’s unfinished memoir of his time at Eagle in the nineteen-fifties has been attracting interest from comics fans, so I’m pleased to have located and got … Continue reading New in July 2015: Michael Gibson article from ‘Eagle Times’. Work in progress: dissenting poets in the First World War
Michael Gibson (1918-2000), a prolific children’s author, was the art editor of the Eagle comic during the 1950s. As his niece, I became the lucky recipient of a gift subscription which, arriving earlier than the copies in the shops, made me the envy of my schoolmates (especially the boys). Towards the end of his life, … Continue reading New in April 2015: Michael Gibson remembers teenage authorship, bomb disposal, and Eagle comics
Last summer the Sunday Mirror, in an issue commemorating the outbreak of the First World War, printed one of Wilfrid Gibson’s war poems. The accompanying one-paragraph biography contained seven factual errors. Though I managed to get these corrected in Mirror Online, other misinformation about Gibson persists on the internet and in print. He did not … Continue reading New in March 2015: additional resources on Wilfrid Gibson
New Uploads: For Remembrance Day, I have added links to collages I have made using two of Wilfrid Gibson’s antiwar poems , Armistice Day 1932, and The Victors. Text only versions of the poems here. The Spirit of Resistance: Helen Lowe, 1944-2011 is now available on this site. This short chapter from Women Against Fundamentalism: … Continue reading New in November 2014: collages for Remembrance Day, and book chapter about Helen Lowe.