In Slow Woods is Gill Gregory’s debut poetry collection.

¶ 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

¶ Distant childhood memories, foreign lands and a host of tacit observations create an enigmatic backdrop that carries this collection without diminishing this integrity. 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. If I was to go further into this, I would almost go as far as to say that something in this collection is reminiscent of Prospero’s magic. Despite Gregory’s seemingly modest vocabulary and syllable by syllable approach, she crafts a miraculous "island" of "sounds, and sweet airs [where] our little life is rounded with a sleep [and] if I then had wak’d … I cried to dream again." The collection is timeless.  — Valeria Melchioretto, Tears in the Fence

¶ Gill Gregory’s poems are wonderfully succinct and clear. A joy to read aloud. — Michael Morpurgo

¶ 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, realisation, 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