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Georgia Hilton was joint winner of the Brian Dempsey Memorial Competition in 2018 with her poem "Dark Haired Hilda replies to Patrick Kavanagh". She has written poetry since childhood, and is particularly drawn to the inner lives of other characters, attempting a sort of poetic ventriloquism. She has an MA in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of Winchester where she lives with her husband and three children.
‘Hilton writes with lyrical restraint, and therein lies the pathos. Places offer up their histories and the treatment of the young farmhand [in Swing] is a wound which moves across the generations.’ -- Julian Stannard
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SWING by Georgia Hilton
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I WENT UP THE ROAD QUITE CHEERFUL by Georgia Hilton
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'In “Swing” Georgia Hilton has created a multi-voiced poetic narrative. Each voice is distinctive and relevant. Distant, historical voices are used to show the inhumanity of the time and links the past to the present.'
— Emma Lee, reviewing 'Swing' in The Journal (#62, 2021) 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.
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ISBN 978-1-913329-06-8
Published 1st February 2020 Perfect bound, 148 x 210 mm, 72 pages RRP £10.00 THIS PAYPAL BUTTON IS FOR UK ORDERS ONLY
We regret that if an overseas order is sent to us, we can refund only 90% of the payment made, because there will be a 10% handling charge. |
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