person Gillian Prew, three poems

Born Stirling, Scotland in 1966, Gillian Prew studied Philosophy at the University of Glasgow from 1984 to 1988.

Her chapbook, Disconnections, can be purchased from erbacce-press (2011) and another chapbook, In the Broken Things, published by Virgogray Press (2011). Her collection, Throats Full of Graves, has been published in 2013 by Lapwing Publications. A further collection, A Wound’s Sound, was released from Oneiros Books in April 2014.

Her latest chapbook, Three Colours Grief, was published by erbacce-press in June 2016.

She has been twice short-listed for the erbacce-prize and twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

~

tiny elegy

morning, stillborn/
                      a room and a worm/
a small earth-rooted loss
flowers erupt         tiny scented volcanoes
pressed into the day’s gauze

~

Still Life/ Whale

So much strength dies slowly.
Carol Birch

A farewell of her among the fractal and clotweed
winter light visiting lamps on her eyes.      Silver

and sucked-in, she lies
                                  a wild well of salt and garbage.

Everything is wind, a swirling no (nature
does not approve). Slow minutes
                                            yet a certain hurrying dark.

The world looks on through a lens/ notices
her grief/ notices she has ribbons for teeth.

Water is waking her too late (not even
the gulls shrieking).

O, she moves a fin
                      then a sudden backward breathing.

~

Autumn’s Five Anxieties

1. the loss of green

the grass coming away
and the speaking-out-loud of the leaves

everything they want to say
                          heaves into deadfall                 the warring red of a leafhill
                                                each forest diminishing deciduous
and summer mostly a ghost

2 . the lowering of sun

pale compass                       blanched by the summer rains

                          daylight a sooner varied dark

the north’s breath thinner and thinner
                                              bereft by its first migrations

3 . the lifting sea

sea-points salt-crusted and sore/ a warmed heave

                                              cast adrift

                                                          softening on sea-tongues

4 . the sky redacted

flying ruin/ hanging rain             an untranslatable mist

the smear of unintelligible trees
                                        where the mist looms           has sky-roots

a gloom of grey/ a helio-memory

                            sucked in
                                            and in
                      like the day does not exist

5 . the onset of fire

bramble blood/
            clouds burning from the bottom up
a see-sawing day of scarlet and grey

slow wood with leaves shifting like flames           stems
                                                                                                  of a lit-up dark
                                                the hillsides soft-gilded

the earth leaf-whelmed/
                        drowned in a blazing shroud