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Photo: Robert Gregory
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GILL GREGORY (UK)
Gill Gregory received a BA (Hons) in English from the University of Southampton and a PhD (Victorian poetry) from Birkbeck College, University of London. Before entering higher education she traveled and lived in Dublin for several years. She also worked for an adult literacy scheme in London in the late 1970s where new, dynamic approaches to teaching and writing were being pioneered. She currently holds a post at The University of Notre Dame in London.
Her poems have been published in a wide range of journals including Critical Survey, English, The Frogmore Papers, Leviathan Quarterly, Poetry Review, The Reader, The Rialto, Stand, Tears in the Fence and in the anthologies, Oceans, Foreign Affairs and Untitled (published by The Red Wheelbarrow). Her book, The Life & Work of Adelaide Procter: poetry, feminism & fathers was published by Ashgate in 1998 ("consistently compelling and original readings…particularly sensitive to themes of expression", Religion & Literature). She also has essays in several books on 19th-century poetry and has reviewed for The Times Literary Supplement and Women: a cultural review.
Gill Gregory’s memoir, The Sound of Turquoise, published by Kingston University Press (2009), traces the history of her Russian grandfather who fled Tashkent in 1904 when all his family were executed. The writer is entranced by his story, which includes a friendship with Benjamin Britten and a tale attached to John Constable’s painting, Chain Pier, Brighton ("Subtle and beautifully written. The tenderness and the bleakness, the jokes and the tragic tensions…are unforgettable" (Isobel Armstrong); "An exquisite and mesmerizing book, with pain gloriously transformed into gentle reconciliation." (Boika Sokolova)).
Gill Gregory writes: "My poetry has emerged from a long engagement with language and memory, grief and desire, pain and pleasure. In among all those words I have sought the lighter and more spacious language I wonder at in Alice Meynell’s fine-tuned poetry." |
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REVIEWS
“Gill Gregory's first collection is luminous and suggestive. If these subtle, intelligent and sensory poems have a seductive quality, they are equally poems tempered by a strong awareness of people, and the world, and of histories that are both owned and imagined. They are poems that surprise and resonate.”
Deryn Rees-Jones (UK)
“Gill Gregory's lean, stripped back poems have the economy of proverb combined with an emotional and intellectual force that resonates far beyond their spare lines. The moving description of Rachel Whiteread's plinth (in Trafalgar Square) as ‘ghosting its own gentle joke’, for instance, manages to say more about the artwork than several paragraphs of art criticism could. There are multiple surprises here: figures such as Darwin are recreated in minute and psychologically insightful terms and scientific rationalism is fused with an evocative account of 'house and home'. This is dynamic and also wise poetry and what is ultimately most pleasing is that the poems and the collection as a whole seem to describe the patient evolution and transformative power of poetry itself. Gill Gregory's In Slow Woods deserves to be widely read.”
Dr. Andrew Teverson (University of Kingston, UK)
“Gill Gregory’s work has the kind of limpid minimalism which other poets envy. The words ‘light’ and ‘breath’ are often key elements in poems which capture the indefinable texture of moments of recognition, realization, or recollection. Objects of fierce individuality are depicted and lodge in the reader’s mind – a palm-held snow globe containing a Russian town in miniature, Rachel Whiteread’s inverted eleven-ton resin plinth in Trafalgar Square, the trace of an etching on the wall of a Nile temple, and a shell studied by Darwin, which seems changed by the minuteness of his eight-year scrutiny, like the world that Gregory’s poems scrutinize and engage with. Her work has a geographical, temporal and conceptual restlessness which exhilarates and intrigues.”
Peter Barry, poetry editor of English (Aberystwyth, The University of Wales)
“Gill Gregory’s poems are wonderfully succinct and clear. A joy to read aloud.”
Michael Morpurgo (former Children’s Laureate, UK)
“Gill Gregory’s poems have a gentle exterior, and a musical tone which often finds space for an unusual word, which may be used with rare judgment. But their surface is only the beginning of an exploration which admits the reader to wistful, questioning interior spaces, full of insight and hinted-at complexity. Work that will reward many re-readings.”
Christopher Southgate (UK)
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FORTHCOMING PUBLICATION
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In Slow Woods
by Gill Gregory (UK)
with artwork by Elizabeth Jane Gregory (UK)
Spring 2011
poetry | paperback | first edition of 300
978-0-9552904-6-6 (UK)
$19.95 CAN | €12.00 EUR | £10.00 GBP
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