Change

The Change in Gill Learner’s third collection refers to both personal experience and what’s been happening in our third-millennium world. At its core are poems reflecting on the sudden death in July 2018 of her husband. With recognisable images and emotional resonances, she guides us through both internal and external landscapes.

Empathy with the threatened and dispossessed is powerfully expressed, but there is plenty to celebrate in her passion for the arts, particularly music. Here we travel from prehistoric southern England to twentieth-century Leningrad via the Spanish Steps and the Vienna of two hundred years ago. Alongside these journeys there are lyrical and sometimes light-hearted evocations expressing love and concern for the natural world.

Author Biography

Gill Learner was born and grew up in Shirley, just outside Birmingham. She moved south in the early 1960s and has lived in Reading for over four decades. In her middle years she began working in the printing trade and eventually taught Printing studies at Berkshire School of Art & Design until her retirement in 1999; it was soon after that she began writing poetry. She has been widely published in magazines and anthologies and her first collection, The Agister’s Experiment was published in 2011, and Chill Factor in 2016.