Poems in Poetry Salzburg Review
Some new poems by Duncan McGibbon will appear in Poetry Salzburg Review No. 18, out autumn 2010.
Articles by Duncan on poetry topics
Laurence Binyon, Poet of the Great War - A Remembrance Ode Heard by Millions
Shakespeare's Fifty Third Sonnet, More Substance Than Shadow?
 UNI-VERSE presented the launch of
Duncan McGibbon’s The Consolations
Duncan's book was launched on Saturday 9 January 2010 at the Bath Royal Literary & Scientific Institution (BRLSI)
in Bath. Light refreshments were provided courtesy of Mulfran Press
and books were sold at the special launch price of £7.00. Although the weather prevented a number of people from being able to attend, there was a good crowd and it was a most enjoyable occasion.
About Duncan McGibbon and contact address
This is McGibbon’s first full collection of poems, following on from
the selection of his work presented in Divers, the Poetry
Workshop (1983) anniversary anthology (2008), his oratorio Stations of Love (2000) and the Vennel Press Brief Pleasures pamphlet Channel (1998). Duncan McGibbon is a full-time poet who lived and tanght in London, Geneva, Melbourne and Berne before returning to England, where he lives in Bath. Duncan welcomes discussion with readers. You can contact him by email: duncanmcgibbon30849@btinternet.com.
comments on Duncan McGibbon’s previously published poems
… very evidently concerned with what is most important in the whole act of creating with words.
Alan Brownjohn, Kites Alive
I am always pleased by signs of externally applied forms in poetry and even more so when they are not merely traditional ones but things the poet has invented for himself.
Peter Porter, Kites Free
McGibbon’s characteristic use of a high rhetorical tone coupled with the use of words chosen for their precise … nature.
Richard Price, Channel, Brief Pleasures 5
The classically elegant and cannily lyrical poems [by Duncan McGibbon in Divers] are redolent of people and places, often in continental Europe. 'Jardin De Luxembourg' catches the transitory nature of the famous park as a place of assignations, trysts and misplaced lives in an almost cimematographic fashion, but in the end leaves the position of the unnamed narrator elusive and perhaps contingent. 'A Pastoral, Bath' is a witty and ironic take on how to conduct ‘a ragged-edge life / In the perfect / symmetry of the past’.
Steven Barfield and Suman Bhuchar, Literary London.
Mulfran Press home page
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The Consolations by Duncan McGibbon
 With its epithet that the heart should speak, Duncan McGibbon explores the consolations of the poor, of the story, of the fallen.
These explorations take the poet on journeys from Our Lady of
Geneva through the desolate Bernese Oberland, through
Haworth under an eclipse and through the spiritual landscape of
Saint Seraphim’s Niszny Novgorod, before returning to Our Lady
of Bruges and the heart of his family.
The Consolations, Duncan McGibbon
65 pages, £7.95, ISBN 978-1-907327-00-1
[also available from Blackwell]
from 'Seraphim at Sarov' in Part Three:
The Consolations of the Fallen
An age of reasoned unreasonableness,
where time overgrows its borders.
The good undone has burst with viciousness,
while conscience overdue has made for worse.
Make toil your prayer, or prayer your stress
even in sleep, except that you converse,
with Him. Fall on your face and confess,
burn night into dawn. He is your Nurse,
for you to live as He does now, as guiding guest.
III. The Mysterion Pokrov, 6
Spring thaws the river-banks,
a simmering personhood.
Mosquitoes pinch our flanks.
Throw off your earthly cloak or hood.
They too were framed to His call.
So they breathe, as all brutes should?
Then leave them to swarm and to fall.
They sing Your all.
I. The Genesis Maphorion, 5
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