Released:
15 April 2011

Cover Artwork:
Elizabeth Jane Gregory, Untitled, mixed media

Printing:
Gaspereau Press, Kentville, Nova Scotia | jacket: processed colour on Domtar Natural | cover: letterpress on Mohawk Komono Red | inside: offset on Zephyr Antique Book Laid with logo in letterpress, composed in Cyan on 10 pt. | Smyth-sewn and perfect bound

Table of Contents | Poems | Author Page

REVIEWS

"These poems have the smooth, airy, orderly elegance one might associate with a school of silver birches in the Russian Plain come midwinter… The experiences at the root of these poems is well seasoned, matured and resolved… [There is an] uncluttered vision behind the work [that] may be seen to indicate the influence of Imagist poets, and Gregory displays a similar approach to economising language as say H.D. or William Carlos Williams. However, these poems refuse to harness their lyrical expressiveness and, on the whole, are more delicate and elusive in nature. Her formula of constrained scope, controlled movement and stark endings seduce the reader to return to the beginning for further savouring and, in doing so, she triggers a highly compelling…effect. Gregory…is an astute and inventive writer who has developed her own distinct yet well informed voice. This collection speaks to the eye and the soul as well as the ear and the mind. Distant childhood memories, foreign lands and a host of tacit observations create an enigmatic backdrop that carries this collection… Few first collections are as coherent in their layout and consistent in their tone of voice. The well-defined voice relies on melting down time and space to fashion a fluid wakefulness as it usually only occurs in dreams. Clearly there is an ambitious mind behind these poems, keen to explore complex inner worlds that can barely be expressed, and despite restraint, the result is utterly exciting."
Read review excerpt…
Valeria Melchioretto, Tears in the Fence (March 2012)

"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 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)