Juliet's pamphlet - Unthinkable Skies - was published in March 2010.
Juliet was born and grew up in Manchester, but apart from two years in Malawi has lived in Edinburgh all her adult life.
She edits the online poetry journal Bolts of Silk and blogs at Crafty Green Poet. She has facilitated creative writing
workshops for a number of organisations including The Salisbury Centre in Edinburgh and Vogrie Country Park in Midlothian.
Reviews:
Active environmentalist Wilson takes us gently through her vision of a world that is slipping away from the fingertips of its occupants,
ghosts of cranes, howler monkeys, extinct parrots, lost landscapes move through its pages. Wilson is a patient recorder of the beauty
that is disappearing from the world and a meticulous observer of the natural in the urban. The seasons that pass under our noses as
we curse from cars the weather she is out there enjoying as wonders of the world and precisely recording their existence for those who forget.
The culminative effect of these poems is of a soul that feels the loss deeply but still actively works with hope that she can make a difference.
It is a delightful read and her observations of nature are fresh and inspirational. I read this book in one sitting as once I started reading
I was caught up in the tender insistence and determination of the words.
Kevin Cadwallender
These poems are full of birds too, but one bird has been with me since I first read “Domesticated” a few weeks ago: a pet goose,
bound to earth by habit and domestication, wondering at the sound of wild geese flying overhead during migration:
Flightless and petted, you enjoy comforts
of home and hearth,[…]
Winter air fills with honking
geese in joyful formation
high in unthinkable sky.[…]
Later you puzzle over dreams
of endless blue and the steady beat of wings.
I feel for that goose. For my dogs that once were wolves. For all of us who every now and again might wish we could go back to
swinging through the trees with our most distant ancestors. This isn’t to say that being civilized and having our modern human
culture doesn’t have its perks (the internet, electric guitars), but with it we’ve disconnected from the natural world and Unthinkable Skies
does a wonderful job exploring that disconnection and suggesting possibilities for reconnection.
Finally these poems are full of space and silence. Space for a reader to enter into Wilson’s richly described world, to sit with her
on a beach listening to shorebirds turn stones or reflect on the emptiness of a field after the birds have migrated. With that space,
comes a reverent silence perfectly balanced between notes of mourning and wonder, a wonder that fills me as a reader with hope.
Unthinkable Skies reminds us that this Earth and all its creatures—even us apes—is beautiful and holy and in trampling it, we lose
some deep and important part of ourselves.
James Brush
Full review by Coyote Mercury here.