Selima Hill’s Women in Comfortable Shoes is different again [to O’Brien’s Embark and Gross’s The Thirteenth Angel]. The poems are all short – many if not most six or fewer lines. They’re grouped into sequences but even within these I think they largely work as separate units. They have the punchiness of epigrams but unlike epigrams what most offer is not pithy reflections on life in general but flashes of extremely subjective response to another person or to the speaker’s immediate circumstances. She appears at different ages, as a child at home or a girl in a boarding … Continue Reading

Many readers will already be familiar with Selima Hill’s brilliant and extraordinary writing. I’d urge any who aren’t to become so, and Men Who Feed Pigeons would be an excellent place to start.

Selima Hill is very obviously a highly intelligent and sophisticated writer but she’s not at all a difficult one. My comments may sometimes be heavy-handed but I want to emphasise that this extremely accessible book gives immediate pleasure that increases in a very natural way as the poems show more and more of themselves to the reader.

They’re mostly very short and are grouped in seven sequences. The first … Continue Reading

Selima Hill, My Mother with a Beetle in her Hair, Shoestring Press; 40pp, £6

You can find my review on the London Grip by clicking here.