Gill McEvoy : part five

How important is music to your poetry?

A poem is nothing if it has no music of its own; it needs a rhythm, a subtle musicality. Music, as poetry, can dare to go into the deepest and most difficult terrain of the human experience. It goes hand in hand with poetry. And for the poet, and I mean this particularly for myself, there is music to be heard in so many mundane things: the four notes of a gate creaking open, the notes of a sign swinging in the wind, the swish of tyres on a wet road, the tiny vibrations of a spoon settling on a counter. This all goes back to my joy when my aunt was teaching me about simple words. Sound. I am so grateful for hearing. 

Gill McEvoy : part four

When you require renewal, any particular poem or book you return to? 

Yes, Wendell Berry’s poem “The Wild Geese”. There are other poems that I resort to also but this one is especially important. And when I feel a poem is important I try to memorise it. It’s about the end of a busy farming season, a day of relaxing, time to think about departed friends, to look at the “tree in promise, pale, in the seed’s marrow”, and to consider the way the geese that fly overhead hold to their way, trusting to their faith in their direction. And it closes with a prayer “to be quiet in heart, in eye clear”. I think those few words are absolutely essential to a poet’s way of being, to consider carefully, to see clearly. 

Gill McEvoy : part three

How do you know when a poem is finished?

There is no one answer to this. I have read that it took Elisabeth Bishop 23 years to finish her poem “Moose”.  Which seems astonishing but it’s not really. I’m sure most poets could go back through their published and unpublished work and find many ways of improving it with judicious editing. The only poems I would consider finished are those that arrive like a sudden gold coin dropped by the gods in front of you, poems so rightly themselves that it would seem like travesty to change anything. They’re very rare. Most poems, including my own, require a good deal of work to get them ‘right’. And even after that they could still be improved. And I am never sure when any of my poems are ‘finished’. I’ll be working on them until I’m finished myself! 

Gill McEvoy : part two

How did I first engage with Poetry?

I think when I was about 3 and an aunt began to teach me to read: she wrote simple sentences, with a rhyme in all of them. And I loved it, relishing the sounds as if they were a special box of sweets given to me. I played with the words too, I remember, trying to read them in different orders. They sounded so good on the tongue: dog, frog, cat, mat. All very simple but to me as a child they were as elaborate and wonderful as anything I might come across as an adult. She evoked in me a love of rhyme, and I still have that, really enjoying, in particular, internal rhyme in a poem and many of my poems have that. I also take huge pleasure in reading Japanese and Chinese poetry, in translation; I appreciate its subtle and skillful simplicity.

Gill McEvoy : part one

Gill McEvoy: She wrote and had success with fiction before turning to poetry. Her poetry career has seen three pamphlets from Happenstance Press UK, the 3rd of which The First Telling, about the aftermath of rape, won the Michael Marks Award in 2015. Two collections The Plucking Shed, 2010, and Rise, 2013 from Cinnamon Press. Recent collection Are You Listening? (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2020). Awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2012. Joint winner of Hedgehog Press’ competition for a “Selected”, to be published in 2022. Gill lives in Devon, UK where her greatest pleasure is in helping plant wildflowers round the village in an attempt to encourage back some of the insects we’re losing so fast.

What I’m working on:

On a collection of poems selected from my work in the last 20 years. It’s a delight for any poet to have a ‘Selected’, especially as most magazines now only want unpublished work. All those published poems locked up in the cupboard after having had just the one outing!  This “Selected’ will fall into two categories: “Creatures” as many of my poems have been abut animals or birds; and “People, Places and Plants”. It’s wonderful to go back and reconnect with the really good poems, and to be surprised too at how much you’ve written!