Spring Journal

by Jonathan Gibbs

Too many are dead, but jobs are dying too, all over.
The virus reveals the flaw
In our way of living: the rich fly it around the planet
And dump it on the doorsteps of the poor.

Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal, written August to December 1938, was an immediate personal response to the public events of those months and the mood on the streets. ‘It is the nature of this poem,’ a prefatory note declared, ‘to be neither final nor balanced.’

In Spring Journal, written between March and late August 2020, the novelist Jonathan Gibbs replies to MacNeice and redeploys his form in an urgent, fluent act of witness to the events of this Covid year. Angry, desperately sad, self-aware, sceptical about what writing is for, the book is both a week-by-week record and something ‘carved from chaos’.

82 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2020

Reviews

[Simon Barraclough · Rating 4 out of 5]

A timely project and a heroic effort, by turns acerbic and moving. An important document for this plague season of scandal and malice. An important slab of evidence and poetic witness. Nothing can match the original Autumn Journal, of course, and the author knows this. And we know this.

[Fiona Erskine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes, in writing, less is more. Sometimes you need a poet's observation skills, razor sharp insight and artistry to cut through the darkness and shine a light on what matters.