Sightings

In Sightings: a collection of poetry with an Essay, "Communicating Poems", supported by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, academic turned full-time writer and editor Gillian Bickley invites the reader to share her enjoyment of city and country, simple and complex ideas and events, and her empathy with the largely innocent people she has come across. In her trademark transparent style, she draws on events, happenings, creatures, artefacts and objects she has seen, and on places and people she has experienced in Asia, Europe, North America and Africa, as well as on stimulating and memorable books she has read. In strongly contrasting mood, a final sequence of poems, taken from a long novel in progress, sketches a chronological narrative, alive with complex emotions, concluding in a form of quiet acceptance. In "Communicating Poems", she considers the practicalities of addressing both local and global audiences in a single edition of poetry, taking as examples her first two poetry collections, Moving House and other Poems from Hong Kong and For the Record and Other Poems of Hong Kong. She has expanded and revised this essay from a talk she gave at a Hong Kong Baptist University Seminar and now invites feedback from readers on the ideas presented in it. A number of black and white photographs illustrate the poems and indicate some of the sights which inspired them. Some enter into dialogue with the poems and others extend them.