IN SLOW WOODS

¶ 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

• 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

¶ Gill Gregory’s poems have been published in a wide range of journals including Stand Magazine, Critical Survey, English, Poetry Review, The Reader, and The High Window. Non-fiction works include The Life & Work of Adelaide Procter (Routledge, 1998), The Sound of Turquoise (Kingston University Press, 2009), and The Studio (Free Association Books, 2015). She reviewed for the Times Literary Supplement and recently retired as a lecturer of 19th and 20th-century literature at The University of Notre Dame in London.