Georgia Hilton

Georgia Hilton has written poetry since childhood, and is particularly drawn to the inner lives of other characters, attempting a sort of poetic ventriloquism. Georgia recently gained an MA in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of Winchester where she lives with her husband and three children.

She was joint winner of the Brian Dempsey Memorial Competition in 2018 with her poem "Dark Haired Hilda replies to Patrick Kavanagh"

Swing
by Georgia Hilton

Published 1st February 2020

ISBN 978-1-913329-06-8
Perfect bound, 15 x 21 cm
72 pages

Swing is a poetic narrative that explores themes of grief, loss and remembrance, as well as class conflict in the early nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Whilst inherently dramatic, the collection takes an understated approach to the calamity that collectively befell the community of Micheldever, and Southern England as a whole, during the 1830’s. Using a host of voices, from that of the minor poet and playwright, J.R. Ackerley, in the 1940’s, to that of the mother of Henry Cook, a farmhand executed for his part in the Swing Riots, Swing evokes a melancholy in the reader that is as mysterious as it is unsettling. Characters appear almost as wraiths out of the gloom, before they melt again into the back-ground, but not before they get to say their piece. The mystery of Swing is encapsulated in J.R Ackerley’s fruitless search for Henry’s unmarked grave, a quest that isrepeated a century later by the author, who attempts to imaginatively resurrect both Cook’s contemporaries and Ackerley himself. Swing is resonant with secrets: the secrets of an establishment that reacted savagely to protect itself, and the secrecy of the impoverished community that buried Henry Cook “on a winter’s day pregnant/with a silence louder than bells.

‘Hilton writes with lyrical restraint, and therein lies the pathos. Places offer up their histories and the treatment of the young farmhand is a wound which moves across the generations.’
Julian Stannard

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I went up the lane quite cheerful
by Georgia Hilton

ISBN: 978-1-907435-70-6
Published 1st September 2018

Perfect bound
17 poems
33 pages
Cover photograph by Joanna Betty Conlon
RRP £8.00

Garryowen

1
Wherever you are in Limerick,
if you are lost, child, look
for the spire of St. John’s
and you will find your way home
to the green where two
or three piebalds are grazing
and the electricity pylons
break up the skyline, and the small
grey pebble-dash terraces straggle
all the way from the greyhound track
and the Black Battery
to St. Patrick’s Well.

But don’t wander any farther,
or you’ll reach the abattoir. Ah,
you say, you already found it?

2

I went up the lane quite cheerful
to the buzzing of a hundred flies,
noticing a dark stagnant puddle
fed by a brownish trickle, and then
peering over the edge of a skip,
saw it was full of parts of cows.

A hoof here, a tail there, in another
place an eyebone, which, my cousin
swears, are quite delicious. And then
a man dressed in yellow rushers,
a blue hairnet and a white coat
covered in plate-sized bloodstains
emerged from a low building.

I ran all the way back to the green
where two or three piebalds
were grazing, the glue sniffers
gathered like a congregation,
and from the shrine on the hill
the Blessed Virgin, bathed
in a greenish light, hovered
over it all like an apparition.

© Georgia Hilton
(From "I went up the lane quite cheerful")

'This debut pamphlet by Georgia Hilton is a gem. The minutiae and control are exquisite. Such sure-footedness. Entire histories are contained in these beautiful, haunting spaces. Such laconic gifts and such lyrical high notes too!

Hilton’s Irish background creates a literary-cultural resonance and we come across poems such as ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Debt’ (a nod to Yeats) and the wonderful ‘Dark-Haired Hilda Replies to Patrick Kavanagh’. There are named people, street names (a sense of place in fact), such a rich atmosphere. It’s temping to remember, for a moment, Joyce’s vignettes, where the balance between exposition and showing make The Dubliners such an important book. ...'

Julian Stannard

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