Roughly Speaking: New and Rejected Poems

By Eddie Gibbons

Every poet has a drawerful of rejection letters.
The poems in Roughly Speaking by Eddie Gibbons have for many years - some since as long ago as 1980 - lived in the shadows of their siblings who went on to have wildly exciting lives in Eddie's published poetry collections.
Roughly Speaking is Eddie Gibbons' fifth volume of poetry and contains both new and rejected poems. Though some of the works included in Roughly Speaking have had brief moments of infamy in poetry magazines the majority have never seen the bright light of public acceptance, their prime achievement to date being the collection of rejection slips.
To keep these overlooked orphans company there is a small band of brand new poems ― although the readers will have to make up their minds which is which.
WHAT THEY SAID ABOUT HIM:
"This particular selection would not be a good fit for our coming edition."
The OFI Press
" Unfortunately, we will not be accepting your work this time."
Ink, Sweat & Tears
"However, we do not feel the work is quite right for the magazine."
Atrium
"Eddie's boundless capacity for forging a funny and poignant poetic language from common speech makes everyday things shine."
Seán Bradley
"Eddie can be formally elegant, devastatingly iconoclastic, and is a master of everything he puts his pen to."
Anna Crowe
"None of the work you sent is suitable for our magazine."
Obsessed With Pipework
"Eddie's poems should be on the national curriculum."
Kirsty Gunn
* * *
Eddie Gibbons was born in Huyton, Liverpool. He moved to Scotland in 1981. His first collection Stations of the Heart was published in 1999, when he was fifty.
In 2008, he was a prize winner in the inaugural Edwin Morgan International Poetry Competition. His fifth collection, What They Say About You, was shortlisted for the Scottish Poetry Book of the Year award, 2011.
A regional judge for the Faber / Ottakars National Poetry Competition, Eddie has been a guest reader at the Berlin British Council, Stanza International Poetry Festival, Dundee Literary Festival, Aberdeen University's WORD festival, and the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Poetry Imprint
• Release date: Oct 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9781914090479

Book preview

ROUGHLY SPEAKING

New & Rejected Poems

i.m.

Keith Bergquist

Phil Hearne

Gerard Rochford

Les Murray

YNWA

for Barbara, Jennifer & Florian

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

The Waste Ground

A Northern Lad

Early Morning, West Hartlepool, 1963

Jackie Wilson Said

The Nights Of Pearly Spencer

Tamla

Visitation

Ruby Tuesday’s Sister

Field Notes For Das Kapital

A Northern Soul

Anarchy In Arbroath

Working Class Nero

Further Adventures In Austeritania

The Empty Tombs

Maria Yudina, Stalin’s Pianist

The Interplanetary Bus

Elephant : Tyne

What Matters

North Bridge, Edinburgh

The Fog

An Erasure

Breakfast In America

Slipstreaming McHale

About The Weather

Interesting Things To Do With Bamboo On A Desultory Day In The Ming Dynasty

Crossing Crossing The Rubicon

Why Don’t You Look Me Up Sometime?

A Word In Her Ear

Scanagrams

Cover Version

Cytokine

Taken In The Flood

The Masque Of Knackery

The Black Stuff

Signal Failure

The Rolling Thunberg Review

That Pharaonic Pussy Fallacy

Agenbite Of Nitwit

Here Comes Your 19th Virus Lockdown

Don’t Stand So Close To Me

Machine Gunning The Muse

Auguries Of Insolence

In The Mothra Bar

Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weenies

Akhmatova’s Ushanka Hat

What’s He Writing?

Machu Picchu

Gone Fishing

Sparrowhawk

Refuge

Copyright

How can you expect a man who’s warm to understand a man who’s cold?

– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

THE WASTE GROUND

They arrived on the planet when the world

fell silent and the violent hours had passed,

those raw replacements for the fallen,

born in the ashes of the aftermath.

The Fifties emerged, dazed and bemused,

with bomb-riven streets in ravaged towns.

Happiness was rationed and out of fashion.

The world waited for the dust to die down.

Children war-gamed with Panzer prams,

Spitfiring arms stormed an enemy fortress.

Relief maps of post-war Europe were traced

in sweat stains on an abandoned mattress.

Playgrounds were waste ground: ransacked

motors were castles defended. Possessions

were tram scrolls and bus ticket rolls.

Dreads were dentists and polio injections.

In hand-me-downs, they made-do and mended.

Those rag-tag platoons of innocent looters

plundered debris from derelict houses, drove

burnt-out