Air for Sleeping Fish by Gillian Ferguson

Air for Sleeping Fish by Gillian Ferguson

Gillian Ferguson's poems draw on her intense but dislocated encounters with the natural world to interpret a variety of subjects. A city-dweller, but also a wildlife artist, her imagination is rooted in the country, using a painter's palette of vivid, unexpected color and her own personal yet unsentimental symbolism of flowers. Nature is the root for her powerful love poems as well as for poems which capture a significant fragment of memory or find the mythical within the ordinary.

Gillian Ferguson's voice in poetry is assured and distinctive, even in the nervy subjects she divulges with such emotional hazard and control, the sheer discharge of feeling within an honest conception of how a poem should be spoken or writtenAlways, too, there is a pull towards the lyrical, the articulating image, whether a crushed bush ghosted with buds, or more narrative insights, such as love grows us like light. Imaginative, brave, daring, and sometimes opulent, she is a marvellous addition to the number of younger Scottish writers who have been cropping up in such multiples over the past decade or so -- Douglas Dunn

Gillian K. Ferguson was born in Edinburgh in 1965. After studying Philosophy at Edinburgh University, she tutored for the Open University and worked as a wildlife and botanical illustrator before moving into journalism – most recently as television critic for Scotland on Sunday. In 1993 the Scottish Arts Council gave her a Writer’s Bursary, although she had then published very few poems. A selection of her work appears in Maura Dooley’s anthology Making for Planet Alice (Bloodaxe, 1997), but most of the poems in Air for Sleeping Fish are published here for the first time. Her second collection, Baby: Poems on Pregnancy, Birth and Babies, was published by Canongate, 2001. She won a £25,000 Creative Scotland Award and created a major poetry project exploring the human genome called The Human Genome: Poems on the Book of Life. Her most recent work is Flora: The Evolution of Eden about man's genetic connection and common ancestor with plants and flowers. In 2015, she suffered a severe stroke and writes while still in recovery.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781852244163
ISBN 10	185224416X
Title	Air for Sleeping Fish
Author	Gillian Ferguson
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Year published	1997-10-30
Number of pages	64
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.