Selima Hill's poetry has been called wanton, wildly imaginative, tender, intelligent, dangerous, defiant, subversive and startling. All these qualities are strongly present throughout "Gloria", a comprehensive selection drawn from ten formally diverse and thematically unified collections, each offering wild variations on her abiding themes: women's identities, love and loss, repression and abuse, family conflict and mental illness, men, animals and human civilisation. "Gloria" covers all Selima Hill's books from "Saying Hello at the Station" (1984) to "Red Roses" (2006), and is published at the same time as her latest collection, "The Hat" (2008).
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Arguably the most distinctive truth teller to emerge in British poetry...Despite her thematic preoccupations, there's nothing conscientious or worthy about Hill's work. She is a flamboyant, exuberant writer who seems effortlessly to juggle her outrageous symbolic lexicon...using techniques of juxtaposition, interruption and symbolism to articulate narratives of the unconscious. Those narratives are the matter of universal, and universally recognisable, psychodrama...hers is a poetry of piercing emotional apprehension, lightly worn... So original that it has sometimes scared off critical scrutineers, her work must now, surely, be acknowledged as being of central importance in British poetry not only for the courage of its subject matter but also for the lucid compression of its poetics. --Fiona Sampson, Guardian
Her adoption of surrealist techniques of shock, bizarre, juxtaposition and defamiliarisation work to subvert conventional notions of self and the feminine… Hill returns repeatedly to fragmented narratives, charting extreme experience with a dazzling excess. --Deryn Rees-Jones, Modern Women Poets
Wayward, funny, terrifying. Her writing scintillates with hatred, love and absurd insights. --Gillian Beer, Financial Times
Her adoption of surrealist techniques of shock, bizarre, juxtaposition and defamiliarisation work to subvert conventional notions of self and the feminine… Hill returns repeatedly to fragmented narratives, charting extreme experience with a dazzling excess. --Deryn Rees-Jones, Modern Women Poets
Wayward, funny, terrifying. Her writing scintillates with hatred, love and absurd insights. --Gillian Beer, Financial Times
About the Author
Selima Hill grew up in a family of painters in farms in England and Wales, and has lived in Dorset for the past 20 years. She received a Cholmondeley Award in 1986, and was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Exeter University in 2003-06. She won first prize in the Arvon International Poetry Competition with part of The Accumulation of Small Acts of Kindness (1989), one of several extended sequences in Gloria: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008), which also includes work from Saying Hello at the Station (1984), My Darling Camel (1988), A Little Book of Meat (1993), Aeroplanes of the World (1994), Violet (1997), Bunny (2001), Portrait of My Lover as a Horse (2002), Lou-Lou (2004) and Red Roses (2006). Her most recent collections from Bloodaxe are The Hat (2008) and Fruitcake (2009). Violet was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted for all three of the UK's major poetry prizes, the Forward Prize, T.S. Eliot Prize and Whitbread Poetry Award. Bunny won the Whitbread Poetry Award, was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Lou-Lou and The Hat were Poetry Book Society Recommendations.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The works of Selima Hill - collected here in this hefty volume - include poetry so original and delicately woven, that even on being read the third, fourth, thousandth time, still manage to affect me. Despite heavy themes such as mental illness, shakey family relationships, loss of personal identity and death, Hill retains a lightness to her works, often infusing them with humour. The strange juxstaposioning of images her style is known for serve to defamiliarise you from these subjects - previously pawed over in so many films and trashy magazines - so you come to them with new eyes, capable of a new empathy and understanding far from the voyeristic gawping much of our media panders to.
By K. BOYD
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
These poems are arresting and refreshing. I don't look for transparency with them, but try to stay alert for the extraaordinary images and the often darkly comic scenarios and vignettes. Selima Hill is a one-off. A national treasure who is not likely to be poet laureate any time soon.
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