It was announced via Instagram yesterday evening that the poet Andrea Gibson had died.
A few years ago, I had the privilege of seeing Gibson live on stage. You can read the write-up from the first time in 2018, at the Mash House in Edinburgh. Unaccountably, I haven’t covered the second time; for my own future reference, this was on 20 May 2019 at the Queen Margaret Union in Glasgow.
Yet I’m struggling to add anything further than what I wrote in that first entry.
What I really want to do is encourage you to pick up one of their albums, from Bullets and Windchimes (2003) to Hey Galaxy (2018) and just listen to a few tracks. The imagery and the metaphors are delivered at a machine-gun pace, so don’t be surprised if you need to pause for breath. You can also seek out one of their collections, but – cards on the table – I think there’s more to be gained from listening rather than reading.
Andrea Gibson was someone who would never dream of demanding plaudits, but conversely, won so many fans by simply speaking about the world as they saw it. Had they lived past 49, I have the feeling we would have heard so much more over the coming decades.
Gavin Cameron 