‘The Spot’ Leopard Magazine, March 2005

Haworth Hodgkinson, Features Editor

Koo Press has just brought out a new poetry collection with the title Three-Way Street, featuring the work of Gerard Rochford, Eddie Gibbons and Douglas W. Gray, all members of the Dead Good Poets.

Whether tacking the absurdities of day-to-day life, relishing moments of joy or nursing the disappointments of failed loves, these are poems primarily about people, and the three poets, writing in very different styles, each find new and distinctive ways of exploring the age old concerns of human experience.

Gerard Rochford’s subjects range from sensitive portraits of children to reflections on the darker world of everyday adult tragedies. The pain of betrayal is a recurring theme in several of his poems, sometimes gently understated, sometimes startlingly bitter, whilst elsewhere he invites us to draw parallels between the lives of birds and our own.

Eddie Gibbons, master of wordplay and the extended metaphor, might at first glance appear to be the comedian of the trio – titles like At the Tomb of the Unknown Accountant or Thus Sprach Zebedee prepare us for his characteristically quirky humour – but he is equally capable of expressing the deepest of feelings. Indeed there often seems to be an emotional charge behind his satire, and wit is seldom absent from his most sensitive writing. And just try reading the piece about Ken Dodd’s dad’s dog out loud without getting your tongue tied!

There’s wordplay too in the writing of Douglas W. Gray, a way of making familiar words seem fresh and new, but this is tougher, knottier poetry, uncompromising in its confident interplay of fleeting images, yet astonishing in its frankness. There are explorations of the darker aspects of life here.

This book is by turns entertaining and though provoking, deeply touching and hilarious, always stimulating. It can be read as a sequence, or dipped into again and again.


Poetry Review 

By Michael Lister.
Scottish Book Collector, Spring 2005

Three-Way Street by Koo Press is a collection by Gerard Rochford, Eddie Gibbons and Douglas W. Gray, all members of the Dead Good Poets in Aberdeen. Their poetry is dead good too! Rochford concentrates on the seemingly ordinary and write about blackbirds, fallen leaves, a child drawing boats “always boats / boat after boat after boat”, a starfish, a meeting again after many years. Though Rochford’s images are the stuff of daily life, he quietly transforms his themes into the universal.

Douglas W. Gray is the cynic within the group and recalls memories that bite and recreates bittersweet emotions. In the row in “Corvus Corone” he hears “your mother, now your sister too, / for hostile looks pursued by hooded eyes.”

Between Rochford and Gray Eddie Gibbons takes centre stage in the collection. His work too can be acerbic when he writes of loves lost or past, and sings the blues in “Short Measure” – “When you left me, / you left me this – / a lovelorn duvet / bereft of bliss, / a one-hit wonder / short of a Miss, / a trouser snake / that’s lost its hiss, / and two lips / short of a kiss, / a kiss / two lips short / of a kiss.” In “Peridiotic Table”, Gibbons relexicalises the elements we all learnt at school, and attributes to them in his own properties: “Hydrogin – Drunkenness, Hellium – Damnation, Boreon – Tedium, Potatsium – Mashiness, Titanicum – Disastrousness, Zinc – See “Titanicum”, Krapton – Uselessness, Bismuth – Mind your own, etc. And his “Kenneth’s Father’s Canine is Deceased” is a tongue-twisting tour de force. There are few things like it in the language.