‘The closely recorded detail of the natural world is allowed to speak for itself, until it achieves an extraordinary level of ecstatic celebration of love and nature.’
Jo Shapcott
‘The build-up of events, and the poem's denouement, so well achieved, owes much to the poet's sense of the dramatic, and her close, sympathetic observation of life in another culture… a formidable poem.’
Penelope Shuttle
‘The details carry a vivid, sensual, almost erotic charge, the whole poem being life-enhancing as well as saying something in its subtext about the momentous nature of chance meetings.’
Keith Chandler
When it came to finding contributors to a series of poetry evenings called Say the Word at Idea Store Bow, Caroline was an obvious choice. She lead one of the sessions, reading a selection of her writing in a voice that is measured and musical. She writes with great insight of events from her own life in verse so clean it makes your mouth tingle. Lovely stuff.'
Barbara Stretch, Idea Store, Bow, East London
My new collection, Yes, was published by Hawthorn Press in December 2009. The first poem below (Geese Pearls) will show you something of where I live, in North Norfolk, where we are visited each winter by many thousands of geese. Cousins, the second poem, also in the book, arose from my travels through India, and won the Norwich Café Writers prize for the best poem by a Norfolk writer in 2008. You can buy a copy of the book (£5 plus p and p) by contacting me by email via this website.
My first pamphlet, Drowned in Overspill, was published by Crocus Books in 2000, and only a few copies remain in print. Again, you can buy copies from me via the website.
This year (2010) I’ve decided to write a poem a day. One of these is posted at the bottom of this page.
I have done readings at Poetry-next-the-Sea, Welborne Arts Festival, Lancaster LitFest, Speakeasy Poetry and Music club, and Norwich CafeWriters, among others. If you’d like to invite me to read at an event, please contact me.
The arrowhead of geese
labours
into the wind as they
tug on their
rope of sky
honking as they go.
One falls to feed
then another
then a third
the flock tumbling
like
fridge alphabet letters
or a broken string
of pearls.
Caroline Gilfillan
Last year we shared pens and ink blots, whispers,
lying on a single bed beneath the whump of the fan:
‘That boy, yah, so big-headed he is!’ Our plaits looped,
blue-ribboned, caught sun in each coconut oiled kink.
And before that we held hands in the shade of the banyan tree,
our breaths swallowed by leaf rustles, by the root and snort
of the sow and her piglets snouting piles of rubbish,
as we shared the tug of blood through our wombs.
And before that we traced patterns in the roadside dust
with sticks, our dresses thistle burred, our feet
sturdy bare, ankles chink chinking bells, as our
mothers snapped beans, gossiped with crow voices.
And before that our two backs lay side by side
on a pink blanket; our four feet kicked
because kicking makes the dust flash, snips
the threads of light pulled taut from the window.
But now, after marriage plans are announced,
our cries rise like paddy birds. In reply: mouthfuls of sand;
shaken shoulders; our mothers, wet-eyed, slapping our cheeks;
the door locked and barred with a ragged plank; thirst.
I sling a frayed rope over a beam. Two plastic chairs,
off-white, on which our sisters have scribbled fire-red houses,
yellow cars, are kicked away and thump to the floor.
Our fingers stretch, touch like spiders hanging from a single thread.
Caroline Gilfillan
It comes not from clouds
but from a sky that’s doll’s-eye blue
nicked by gulls sharp as cut paper.
It comes not from clouds
but over a lemon-lit horizon,
a billion-strong horde clothed in polished ice
beating at our coats and hats,
laying slippery white planks under our boot soles.
It charges over the shiny slip of the Wensum,
ruffles the mallards’ feathers,
conceals their orange bead eyes,
hangs ice tinsel on every twig
Caroline Gilfillan