Gill Learner
Gill Learner has been writing poetry since 2001. Her poems have been published in many journals and won a number of prizes
including the Poetry Society’s Hamish Canham Prize 2008 and 2nd prize in the Keats-Shelley competition 2010. In 2011
‘Flashpoint’ won the Buxton competition for poems on the subject of ‘fire’. Her first collection, The Agister’s
Experiment, by Two Rivers Press was launched early in 2011.
"The poems here fizz and crackle while exploring the vast range of humanity … [and] leave a lasting impression on the reader in this excellent debut." Poetry Book Society Bulletin
Brought up by Hand
My grandmother is playing her book. Her eyes are fixed
on an invisible horizon of marshland, a churchyard,
hulks slumped at anchor. As her foxed hands slide
from side to side, her wedding ring winks useless light.
The flesh beneath her nails is bleached and the pale tips
of keratin are as thin as threads. The polished pads
have whorls worn faint and overscored with creases
mapping four-fifths of a century. She strokes words
off the page then gives them to the air in a hesitant
incantation I can hardly hear: forge, Pip, Joe Gargery.
Each letter, dash and comma is recorded there,
in a matrix of six dots embossed on weighty paper.
Once I loved her fingers’ creep across my face but now
allow only a graze of flesh on flesh in case she reads
the lies, dodged fares, the fifty-penny pieces filched
from my mother’s purse, the unconfessed carpark nudge,
the drunken shag with the nameless man from Leeds.
Published in Smiths Knoll
© Gill Learner