A Wide River Divides Us — Gill Barr
ISBN: 9781788648738
£9.99
Evoking a childhood in the embattled streets of 1970s Londonderry, A Wide River Divides Us opens with poems that are stark, poignant, at times shocking, as they convey the collision of everyday lives with acts of terror. But the view widens in a compelling shift within the collection. As the adult voice looks to other landscapes and explores the sense of reckoning with the self and the past, seeking a tentative resolve.
There’s extraordinary recall here, an aliveness in the telling. Here is a poetry of witness and trauma, of love and resilience, of experience over and above an embattled innocence. In the end, this collection asks what we might do with our history and whether our attempts to reframe, reclaim or bury it we are doomed to repeat ourselves—or might be a process by which we lead to a greater understanding?
Greta Stoddart
A Wide River Divides Us is an extraordinary mixture of a collection. Witness statement, Proustian evocation of the sweetness of what’s half-remembered, rueful conversations with the poet’s own self: together these create a unique portrait of the artist as a survivor of troubled times.
Fiona Sampson
The opening poems are rooted in memory and location, before the poet takes us out of time and into more fluid, unanchored places, reflecting how the past and its traumas leak into the present and inform the construction of self. A powerful debut.
Moyra Donaldson
Poems full of heart, humour and even-handedness.
Cat Brogan
Author Biography
Gill Barr was born in Londonderry in 1964 and educated at First Derry Primary and Foyle and Londonderry College. She graduated from Loughborough University, where she played hockey for British Universities. She taught English at comprehensive schools in Cambridgeshire and Dorset for over thirty years. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from Queen’s University, Belfast and has received an award for her poetry from the Northern Ireland Arts Council.
Gill’s poems have appeared in publications such as: The Honest Ulsterman, New Humanist, The New European, Bad Lilies, Trasna and Riptide’s Climate Change Matters Anthology. Her debut pamphlet The Price of Violence, included in this collection, was Highly Commended in the 2023 Mslexia Competition. Gill read her pamphlet at Worlds Apart, the inaugural event at the New Gate Arts and Culture Centre in Londonderry in 2024.
Gill has performed at the Bridport Literary Festival, reading her prize-winning short story Skylight in 2016 and her poems in 2018 alongside Annie Freud and Elaine Beckett. She appeared at the Exeter Literary Festival in 2019 and 2021, and at the Ledbury Poetry Festival in 2022 in a quartet with Greta Stoddart, Elaine Beckett and Helen Evans.
Gill lives in a state of flux between Dorset and Derry/Londonderry.