The Change in Gill Learner’s third collection refers to both personal experience and what’s been happening in our third-millennium world. At its core are poems reflecting on the sudden death in July 2018 of her husband. With recognisable images and emotional resonances, she guides us through both internal and external landscapes.
Empathy with the threatened and dispossessed is powerfully expressed, but there is plenty to celebrate in her passion for the arts, particularly music. Here we travel from prehistoric southern England to twentieth-century Leningrad via the Spanish Steps and the Vienna of two hundred years ago. Alongside these journeys there are lyrical and sometimes light-hearted evocations expressing love and concern for the natural world.
From reviews of Chill Factor (2016):
‘a poet … who loves words not only for the ways they shape a poem but for the sheer sound and texture’—South
‘With these wide-ranging, intelligent poems we’re as far as possible from vague rhapsodising. There is room for humour and ruefulness’—ARTEMISpoetry
‘not stunted lines of broken prose, but a lyricism of rhythm delicately and deliberately pointed by assonance and rhyme’—The Interpreter’s House
Gill Learner. Paperback, 84 pages, 210 x 135 mm, October 2021.
