Guest Feature – Gill McEvoy – Patricia M Osborne

Patricia’s Pen recently welcomed poet, Gill McEvoy, to celebrate the launch of her new collection Selected Poems published by The Hedgehog Poetry Press. Today she blogs about the collection. Without further ado, it’s over to Gill.

Selected Poems

Gill McEvoy

It is always a great feeling when another of your books comes to life! And whether it’s a pamphlet or a collection a good deal of hard work goes into preparing it. My inspiration comes from many sources: nature, especially birds and trees; family; trauma (my husband’s illness and death; my own struggle with ovarian cancer), and things I observe. Keeping your ears and eyes open is so important: a chance phrase overheard, a small incident noticed, all can lead to poems. In this particular selection I have used childhood memories of country life including its cruelties like skinning rabbits, slaughtering your much-loved pig etc. I have drawn on family, uncles, aunts and grandparents; and creatures – bats, bees, fish; other poets; and ending with my favourite – birds.

I try always to form my work into some kind of rough arc shape so that poems flow from one to the other without the reader noticing. So in this ‘Selection’ I have not gathered them in order of collections published but have taken from previous work poems that can sit side by side comfortably. First I write down the titles of all the poems I think might fit in a collection, then I try to group them into subject matter before laying the printed poems out either on the floor or clipped in a folder and then reading aloud to see how they work together. Then I weed out anything that doesn’t feel right.

With my earlier collection Are You Listening? (Hedgehog Press,2020) which was about the loss of my husband, I decided to begin with the actual burial and work backwards from there, through his illness to happier times, and coming at last to forgiveness. That collection was also punctuated with other poems that felt right, poems about Derek Jarman, the war photographer George Rodgers, a poem about an encounter with a gravedigger. No face-to-face in Lockdown so that collection never had a launch!

But this new book is going to be launched at least twice, and I hope to do readings from it as often as I can to make up for that!

About Gill McEvoy

Gill McEvoy began publishing poetry in the 2000’s, previously wrote fiction. Three pamphlets from Happenstance Press, the third of which “The First Telling” won the Michael Marks Award for pamphlet poetry. Two collections from Cinnamon Press: “The Plucking Shed” 2010; “Rise”, 2013. And from Hedgehog Press “Are You Listening?” 2020) and Selected Poems (2024). Gill’s interests apart from writing are wildlife: she is an active member of a local group, Bee-Wild, which works round her neighbourhood, planting flowers and trees, to encourage insect and bird life. She runs a well-supported monthly poetry reading group to encourage others to enjoy poetry.