It is always a joy to read Gill McEvoy’s discerning poems with their perceptions and insights and microcosmic observations. In this pamphlet, Summer to Summer Looking we see the narrator’s clarity of attentiveness that can wait and watch for the special moment when one can hear ‘the thinnest trill’ of the dipper and notice in its flight ‘the bright moon / of its small breast’ that shines like snow. )’The Bird by the River’). Elsewhere, the ‘crowned heads’ of two crested grebes are held in the air ‘like hieroglyphics’ (‘At Stover’) while an ‘October Forecast’ lists a season of ‘sharp stars, huge moons’ but also of ‘slow moving wasps and bluebottles’.
Throughout the poems in ‘Summer to Summer Looking’ there is a keen awareness of changes in climate patterns. ‘Drought’ is a particularly vivid and horrifying poem with the sun rising ‘from its blood-streaked bed’ in a ‘blinding sky’ as it burns and scorches the earth and ‘flames take hold of dried-out edges.’ Birds and plants in a later winter season mistake milder weather for signs of spring although, ominously, ‘snow is forecast’. (February Afternoon’)
The quality that appeals to me most of all in Gill McEvoy’s poetry is an impression of transcendence, a symbolism that lies beneath the everyday. One of the most beautiful poems is ‘To Watch a Cloud is Consoling. Always’ where the narrator on her sickbed has been ‘sent’ a cloud as a special gift and observes it shift from being the shape of ‘a grey horse resting in a field’ to becoming a cloud again, ‘as such shapes do’. Yet this gift, this cloud, this grey horse does not disappear. In some way the narrator feels it is ever present.
‘Haunting the Pool by the Bridge’ is a more sombre poem in that it depicts the futile search for the kingfisher’s ‘un-nerving shock of blue’ which would be ‘the longed-for vision’ to ‘fill our hearts with radiance.’ On this occasion it is not to be, but there is hope and a ‘kind of glory’ in the later poem ‘Dealing with the Straying Sheep at the Holiday Cottage’ where someone, possibly a child, has gone out ‘in the dark alone’ to rescue a sheep and afterwards walked about the kitchen in wet bare feet leaving, as a sign of passage, ‘shining prints of night-dew’.
Mandy Pannett 28th March 2025
