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Gillian Bickley

This collection of poems was written during almost thirty years' residence in Hong Kong. Most are on explicitly Hong Kong topics, and reflect the writer's personal experience and knowledge of Hong Kong. Those who have emigrated or who have spent a period of time overseas will empathise with the expatriate experience described. Other poems narrate and reflect on personal events and concerns which will resonate with many. 

“Gillian Bickley has the sharp eye and strong stomach of the true realist. ... brilliantly observed.... ‘Tobacco’ is about as close as any poet comes to word-perfect... Not even the American minimalist William Carlos Williams could zero in on and capture a detail with more panache. ...A thought-provoking and entertaining contribution to Hong Kong literature. Bickley succeeds in conveying the character of the Fragrant Harbour with humorous rigour.” — David Wilson, Sunday Morning Post, 21 September 2003

“In For the Record and other Poems of Hong Kong, Gillian Bickley inhabits a world of movement, traffic, construction and buildings, but her poetry sees through this to a nature of flying, singing birds and lush green trees existing in harmony or sometimes at odds with modern day Hong Kong. Her work offers a counterpoint of the survival and continuity of nature against which our busy everyday lives are measured. Bickley's Hong Kong is both a universal and a personal one and, like Italo Calvino's book The City, she captures a Hong Kong of the mind, the one city that we all share as a physical space against the myriad cities that we experience and perceive distinctly as our own. She skillfully fuses the human and the natural world". — Dave McKirdy, poet, The Asian Review of Books, 21 September 2003.

Proverse Hong Kong

Gillian Bickley Poems

For the Record: and other Poems of Hong Kong

The old is contrasted with the new, fictional with actual life. Links are made between different cultures, different lives, different experiences. The expatriate life-style of constant movement runs parallel with the title of the book.

 "Gillian Bickley writes as she responds to everyday events, always with the echo of 'time's winged chariot' in her ears. The fact of moving house sends her speeding back through the moves of a lifetime and forward to the last move, to the small room of the grave. The opening poem suggests the elusive presence of the author, and the deeper themes glimpsed through her deceptively simple poems. The variety of human life and the individual response to life, these are Gillian Bickley's central interests. The power that invigorates the poems in Moving House is the control of language. In this bare, tight poetry, no idle words are allowed. Its vocabulary draws on the base language of essences and epiphanies. The chosen spare language is the perfect partner for this poetry of mature experience." — Emeritus Professor I. F. Clarke and M. Clarke.

"The poetic observations of a sensitive writer responding to the reality of being alive." "Insightful probing into the darker issues of our lives . . . to make sense of human experience." — Paul Bench, Speech & Drama: Journal of the Society of Teachers of Speech and Drama.

"A privileged view into the emotional, intellectual and spiritual life of its writer." "The profound intimacy of the personal poems, reflecting universal truths about the human condition, renders the reader at once intruder and confidant." — Solveig Bang, Sunday Morning Post.

"Bickley's delicately-crafted poems are faithful word portraits of various aspects of Hong Kong at the turn of the millennium: its landscape, its people, its myths and spirits." —Tammy Ho, Asian Review of Books.

Moving House and other Poems from Hong Kong

GILLIAN BICKLEY was born and educated in the UK and has lived mainly in Hong Kong since 1970. The poems in Sightings are on Hong Kong, European and personal subjects, accessible to many readers, both young and old. They consider what it is like to be a human being in this modern world, drawing inspiration mainly from the people whom the writer has encountered, especially in Hong Kong.

An academic turned full-time writer, editor and publisher, Gillian invites readers and listeners to share her enjoyment of city and country, simple and complex ideas and events, and her empathy with the largely innocent people she has come across. In her trademark transparent style, she draws on events, happenings, creatures, artefacts and objects she has seen, and on places and people she has experienced in Asia, Europe, North America and Africa, as well as on stimulating and memorable books she has read. 

"She has made use of everyday life situations and turned them into life lessons. Sightings inspires us to slow down and taste the sense of the city."— Ma Kwai Hung, Hong Kong.

"The poems in Sightings are witty, poignant, full of memorable images and insights and a total delight." — Professor Ken Pickering

"Sightings conveys playfulness and ironic humour. The writer displays, 'a strong ethical sense and a constant and engaging lyricism'." —Marion Bethel, Bahamian poet

Bickley has, "a talent for turning the stuff of ordinary life into poetry. She continually surprises and delights by making fresh connections between seemingly disparate situations". — Mrs Margaret Clarke, Oxfordshire.

"Gillian Bickley walks around the world with her eyes open, relishing the phenomena she passes".— Harry Guest, Honorary University Fellow, University of Exeter, UK (from his 'Preface' to Sightings).

Sightings: a collection of poetry

People, art and life. A record of a particular space in time. Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Sukhothai, Honolulu, Mexico City, northernmost Scotland, Andorra. Intimates and strangers. A mother and son seen for some seconds on a bridge in Shanghai. The emotions flowing between performer and conductor throughout a concert. The interpretation one creative artist gives to that of another's work. Gillian Bickley values the records we all make: — the heritage we may or may not preserve, what we choose to reveal of our lives, the constant interpretative understanding of the personal as well as the historical past, and the sacredness of memory. Here we find observation and reflection – on current affairs as well as people and places – and also the frisson produced by five "skulls" in a window, a funeral owl caught in hire-car headlights, and the realization that classical stories are re-enacted in our own lives.

 " … a collection refined by the sensitivity and spirit of a poet who observes with the wonder and clarity of someone who is at once an insider and outsider. In her works, we see that Bickley's poetry has the ability to provide both spontaneous, on-the-spot immediacy and lingering, contemplative power…. Every city may have its gaps, ambiguities and unknowabilities, and the poet's intimate and candid reflections in this collection have successfully uncovered some of them." – Hilary Chan Tsz-Shan, Reviews, Asian Cha, February 2010 (Issue 10).

"You are lucky to have this poetry in your hand." — Karmel Schreyer.

"The poems in CHINA SUITE are unpretentious, direct, and even raw, like gemstones freshly dug out of a quarry. The psychological boundaries drawn to separate cultures from cultures, clans from clans, and individual from individual are utterly destroyed. An unnoticed observer, she trespasses ethnic taboos and social no-nos, and writes down whatever she sees without getting caught—in a graceful way." — Elbert S. P. Lee

China Suite and other Poems

PERCEPTIONS consists of short pieces, poetry or poem-like essays, written over a period of thirty years, on various serious and reflective topics, but with some humorous and occasional work too. As in Gillian Bickley's previous collections, the subjects occur internationally: this time, in the Pyrenees, Nigeria, Hawai'i, Albania, as well as Hong Kong. Taken as a whole, this fifth poetry collection recognizes the need for shelter and survival, the desire for love, for achievement, for feelings of self-worth, for objects on which to bestow reciprocal affection and the search for high-order achievements beyond the self. Reaching beyond this, Perceptions considers the needs of other species, our responsibilities towards them and the fragile environment that we all share.

"The poignance of her many perceptions crowds upon us." -- Stuart Christie

"This collection addresses universal topics in a thoughtful manner using common sense that most readers can appreciate. – Cairns Media Magazine

"An interesting addition to home-grown literature" – Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore, Sunday Morning Post, Hong Kong,17 June 2012

Perceptions

Verner Bickley

The fifty poems collected in Gillian Bickley’s Over The Years have been chosen by Verner Bickley from her five previously published collections.

“Sensitive, serious, sincere and sometimes a little sad...." (Dumitru M. Ion ( Romania), Member of the Arts and Sciences Academy in R. Macedonia, etc.,2014)

"Driven by curiosity as a poet but also by responsibility as the president of "The International Festival Curtea de Argeş Poetry Nights" in Romania (There have been twenty editions, attended in total by over fifteen hundred guests from about a hundred countries), I read and translate the lyrics of hundreds of poets. That's how I discovered the exceptional poet Gillian Bickley from Hong Kong. What firstly drew my attention was the savant level of her poetry; the science of balancing the rational with the sentiment. Each of her poems is sometimes a small novel, an essay or at other times a lyrical sublimate. Her poems are remembrances: from the past (an ancient past, a medieval past, and so on), from her own past or a possible reader's past. The way of shaping her poetry especially fascinates the professional reader. Because, of course, a professional poet (as Gillian Bickley is) will always need a professional reader.” – Dumitru M. Ion, 2016.

Over the Years: Selected Collected Poems 1972-2015

Grandfather's Robin offers poems about People, Fellow Creatures, Society, Ekphrasis, Scenes and Moods, Survival, and Short Poems. They were written over several years, in response to people seen, read about, or known, and in response to creatures seen, read about, or known. Other poems respond to group and social behaviour, and reflect responses to works of art. Some poems are prompted by the natural world, urban and village life, and thoughts about the survival of all beings. The short poems offer instants both serious and humorous.

“So many reasons to enjoy Gillian Bickley’s luminous poetry – humour, depth and wisdom. ... Lovely and evocative, Bickley’s powers of observation and precise, selective description lend many of these poems the power of fine portraiture, a sepia photograph, where we see into the eyes, where we discover essence.”

— Jack Mayer, poet (Poems from the Wilderness)

“In this work, Gillian Bickley affords us a glimpse into her perspective. She invites us to reflect on the rich tapestry of life and our shared human experience. Why should you read this collection? Because there is no greater privilege than intimacy.”

 —Mary-Jane Newton poet (Of Symbols Misused, Unlocking)

 

 “... poems as moments of tranquility in which we can encounter lives unrolling in times that ... are anything but. To make a record such as this is a good resolution indeed, and I am pleased that Gillian has chosen for the cover a moment of tranquility I painted. As Mrs. Dorothy Collins might have said, reflecting, as these poems do, the quietness of a life-long practice, ‘Very well!’”

—Steven Schroeder, Chicago