Postlude

Cheesman, Howard

About the work

I have used three poems by the Hexham born poet, Wilfrid Wilson Gibson (1878-1962): ‘Breakfast’, ‘Mark Anderson’ and ‘Lament’. These are now all in the Public Domain.

His use of the commonplace and the ordinary is here transformed through the splintered looking-glass of war. Small things – a glass of water, a football bet – take on a resonance that is way beyond their origins and in the final poem he points to how we are all changed by the experience of conflict to the point at which even impartial nature cannot be seen the same way, ever again. Howard Cheesman