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
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