Excerpt from Twenty-Three Selected Poems
And it is plain that, in an age which is apt to believe that poetry and reality are antithetical terms, such uncompromising fusion of the two must be work of the highest value. For the significance Mr. Gibson reads into, or rather, quite strictly, creates in, this every-day prosaic life, is not that which propagandism too easily provides, but the significance of simple, inevitable, tragic morality. There are not many writers living who can reach with such quiet effort the secrets of human nature which lie hidden behind habit and conduct and reasoning. The reader will be disappointed if he reads Mr. Gibson's work in the hope of exciting detail or curious form. What he will find is a remarkable power of creating form as a whole, which perhaps too scrupulously avoids the distraction of detail; and a power of enclosing in that form a wonderfully humane poetry."
Included in this selection are several poems which relate to the great war, in which Mr. Gibson served as a private soldier. These occupy a distinctive place, especially in that they emphasise the outrage inflicted by war upon that human personality, to the value of which "Daily Bread" and "Fires" drew attention. "Battle" and "Friends" are indeed a "monument to the wantonness of it all, to the cheapness of life in war, the carelessness as to the individual, the disregard alike of promise and performance, the elimination of personality."
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the kindness of Mr. Elkin Mathews in allowing me to reprint poems from "Daily Bread" "Fires," "Thoroughfares," "Borderlands," "Battle," and "Friends"; and to Messrs. Macmillan & Co. for permission to include the poems from "Livelihood" and "Whin." All these are copyright, both in this country and in America 'in the latter case by the Macmillan Company, of New York).
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