Gloria
Selected Poems
Selima Hill's poetry has been called wanton, wildly imaginative, tender, intelligent, dangerous, defiant, subversive and startling. All these qualities are strongly present throughout Gloria, a comprehensive selection drawn from ten formally diverse and thematically unified collections, each offering wild variations on her abiding themes: women's identities, love and loss, repression and abuse, family conflict and mental illness, men, animals and human civilisation.Gloria covers all Selima Hill's books from Saying Hello at the Station (1984) to Red Roses (2006), and is published at the same time as her latest collection, The Hat (2008).
Selima Hill were Poetry Book Society Recommendations.
Her most recent collections from Bloodaxe are The Hat (2008); Fruitcake (2009); People Who Like Meatballs (2012), shortlisted for both the Forward Poetry Prize and the Costa Poetry Award; The Sparkling Jewel of Naturism (2014); Jutland (2015), a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation which was shortlisted for the 2015 T.S. Eliot Prize and was earlier shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize; The Magnitude of My Sublime Existence (2016), shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize 2017; Splash like Jesus (2017); I May Be Stupid But I'm Not That Stupid (2019); and Men Who Feed Pigeons (2021), shortlisted for the 2021 Forward Prize for Best Collection, the 2021 T.S. Eliot Prize, and the Rathbones Folio Prize 2022. Her 21st book of poetry, Women in Comfortable Shoes, is published by Bloodaxe in June 2023.
Selima Hill has been named winner of The King's Gold Medal for Poetry, 2022. The award is being made on the basis of her body of work, with special recognition for her 2008 Bloodaxe Books retrospective Gloria: Selected Poems.
