Two books hot of the presses

Poetry anthology November Gold contains 134 poems by Gibson, many of which were inspired by his life in Hexham, his love for the Northumberland countryside, and his experience living through two world wars.

Coined as a Georgian poet, a term given to poets living under the reign of King George V, Gibson experimented with varying poetic styles in his long career, ranging from Victorian romanticism in his early days to stark realism during and after the outbreak of war.

Divided into 11 categories, November Gold reflects Gibson’s poetic journey from the idealistic to the sombre, opening with a collection of poems dedicated to his loving family and peaceful life in Hexham.

One untitled poem, which is featured at the start of the collection, can also be found etched into the Temperley Memorial Fountain in Hexham Market Square, placed there in 1901 after Gibson won a local competition to have his words inscribed there.

The last lines of the poem read:

“Beneath the open sky my waters spring,

“Beneath the clear sky welling fair and sweet,

“A draught of coolness for your thirst to bring,

“A sound of coolness in a busy street.”

Another category in the collection is Northumbria, where Gibson’s imagination runs wild with inspiration amongst the backdrop of the Northumberland countryside, with references to the “old phantasmal castle” at Dunstanburgh and the “whispering of the wind” at Witches Linn.

Categories Everyday Folk and Working Life reflect a change in Gibson’s outlook on the world however.

In these poems, he moves away from the fantastical, and instead introduces the reader to characters suffering with poverty, loneliness and exhaustion from sheer hard work.

Gibson’s shift in theme was largely to do with his ambition to capture realism and make his poetry reflect everyone’s experiences, including those of working class folk such as industrial workers, circus performers and farmers – people he felt were unrepresented in the literature of the time.

This desire to reflect realism also featured prominently in Gibson’s celebrated war poetry, where he drew inspiration from his two years in the army during the First World War to recreate on the page the everyday life and experiences of a solider.

One of his most famous works featured in the collection is Breakfast, which depicts a group of soldiers eating breakfast and betting on a football game whilst lying on their backs to escape the flying bullets.

The poem reaches a dark conclusion, when one soldier is killed.

It reads: “Ginger raised his head

“And cursed, and took the bet; and dropt back dead.

“We ate our breakfast lying on our backs,

“Because the shells were screeching overhead.”

Editor of November Gold Hilary Kristensen, of Wagtail Press, said she hoped the collection would appeal to previous fans of Gibson as well as new readers yet to discover his talents.

November Gold is available from local retailers.

Ghost Wall, meanwhile, is a fictional work that at times has the lyrical quality of poetry.

Sarah Moss’s sixth novel is a slender book, just 150 pages long, that yet packs a punch.

This Warwick University professor has already been shortlisted for the Wellcome Prize three times and the RSL Ondaatje prize once, and last year, she was guest curator of the Cheltenham Literary Festival.

Tonight, beginning at 7.30pm, an Hexham audience will be able to meet her in person at the Beaumont Hotel, where she will be ‘in conversation’ with fellow author Max Porter, who also happens to be her editor.

The latter was himself shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize in 2015 for Grief is the Thing with Feathers, which he subsequently spoke about at Hexham Book Festival.

The two will talk about Ghost Wall, the novel that coaxed the Independent into describing her as ‘one of the best British novelists writing today’.

The main protagonist, 17-year-old Sylvie, is spending the summer in a scratchy wool tunic and simple leather moccasins in one of those ‘live like the Iron Age folk’ re-enactments.

With a vicious bully for a father and a doormat for a mother, her life is pretty tough in the rough-hewn, claustrophobic hut up on the edge of their forbidding northern moor.

But the site of the camp also has a brutal history – it holds within its soil the remains of a girl sacrificed by her own people.

And as the summer fades, the stories of Sylvie and the long-lost girl of the bogs become intertwined.

In a nutshell, Ghost Wall is about the intoxication of power and the sway of the herd, feminism, domestic violence and the divergence of the generations in 1990s northern Britain.

Ghost Wall is published by Granta Books.