Rise - Gill McEvoy

Rise celebrates Gills extraordinary and fortunate survival after having serious ovarian cancer, and also ventures into new territory with sequences of poems in which the dark and the light are always finely balanced so that the moon, a thin twist of lemon skin,/holds back the night like hope. Moving from poems stalked by death in which the poet admits I would settle for rise. / That would be everything. to a natural world observed with an eye sharp as a scalpel while days are marked off in six month segments between clinic appointments, touching every day with careful fingers, Rise takes the reader into the highly charged territory of survival with grace, intelligence and wit and explores the Earth and the every-day with a lucid precision that transforms a belly into a peach, round and / ripe with tender flesh and a plum into the firm plum / of my heart,/pumping /its way through /my days.

The pleasure of reading Gill McEvoys RISE is immense, particularly if you have time to read it all at one sitting as I did. Then the delicacy and understatement of the poems broaden into a wonderfully rounded picture of a life observed, where pain merges into acceptance and appreciation of the world we live in. A bright dewfall of words as one poem says, never mind that in almost the same breath there is a scalpel raised.
Caroline Carver

Birds are the presiding spirits of these poems not generalized birds but ones of specific species in their habitats, with their precise behaviours. Even the elusive Nuala is something of a bird. The poems themselves move lightly, accurately, staying no longer than they need to, finding what they need for life even on difficult ground. They are always ready, on the turning of a line, to rise and fly.
Philip Gross
Praise for Gill McEvoys first collection, The Plucking Shed

Gill McEvoys poetry has an eerie focus on natural phenomena.
W.N. Herbert

These poems are like jewels. Incalculable pressures underpin their creation. Luminous and compelling (but by no means reassuring) they offer themselves to the light.
Helena Nelson