Recommended Age, Grade, and Reading Levels
- Age: 13
- Grade: 8
Description
"What a wonderful, fresh voice Gillian Wigmore brings to the page. These wise poems know the push and pull within family. They reveal the tender truths behind the rough edges of small-town life. Her voice resonates with authenticity, and whether she is writing about a near drowning or ice fishing, she is ultimately writing about the complications of love. These are poems you will not soon forget."
-- Robert Hilles, Governor General's Award-winner for Poetry
About the author
Gillian Wigmore grew up in Vanderhoof, BC, and graduated
from the University of Victoria in 1999. She has been published in Geist, CV2, filling station, and the Inner Harbour Review, among others. Wigmore won the 2008 ReLit Award for her work Soft Geography and was also shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay BC Book Prize. She lives in north central BC with her husband and two children.
Awards
- Short-listed, Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, BC Book Prizes
- Winner, ReLit Award
Editorial Reviews
[Wigmore] goes after small moments with clear eyes; of course there’s the occasional Big Move, but the poems keep ending small, precisely small, and I’m jealous about her skill.
The characters speaking here aren’t all the same, so it’s not a question of her having found a voice that works (confessionally, for example) and ridden it until the legs fell off. No, she’s worked her craft relentlessly, and the result has been tremendous flexibility in the narrative or lyric voice. These voices share an eye for small things (a knitter’s arthritic hands, a camper’s presumption that a tent muffles all sounds) and a sense of enmeshedness in the worlds around us (social, ecological, familial, etc), but they come out sounding different.
— book addiction
Librarian Reviews
Soft Geography
Rugged and rough images of nature, its harsh power and cold brutal charms, are what these poems leaves in the reader’s mind. The images contain a life of their own, where cars are caves and tents have bones. Everything is made into natural beings and there is a haunting allure to the ideas, cold but full of vitality and thus comforting in its way. Wigmore brings the past and present beauty of BC into relief. Images of death, life, love, sex and time contain the same stark, wintry feeling of the environment that she lives in.Gillian Wigmore is also the author of home when it moves you.
Source: The Association of Book Publishers of BC. BC Books for BC Schools. 2007-2008.
