"FOR THE RECORD and OTHER POEMS of HONG KONG"

ISBN 9789628557028. 118pp. 210c. x140c. Pbk Published 2003 English Poetry - China - Hong Kong - England. C21st - History & Criticism. For the Record and Other Poems of Hong Kong with the text of a talk given to the English Society of the University of Hong Kong, 19 April 2002, "Literary Odyssey in Hong Kong: A Personal Narrative". By Gillian Bickley. Preface by Rosanna Wong, PhD, DBE, JP, President, Hong Kong Schools Music and Speech Association. Supported by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. This collection of sixty poems has been written during almost thirty years' residence in Hong Kong. Most are on explicitly Hong Kong topics, and reflect the writer's personal experience and knowledge of Hong Kong, as well as presenting more personal concerns. Hong Kong residents who have emigrated or who have spent a period of time overseas will empathise with the expatriate experience described. The two audio CDs included with the book contain a professional recording of all the poems in this collection, read by Gillian.

Here is what some reviewers have said:

• "For the Record is a perceptive account of life and people mostly in Hong Kong, rendered with empathy, humour and surprise. A songbird in a cage, old ladies on their morning walk through a campus, a patient holding the hand of another in a hospital ward can all inspire Gillian Bickley to poetry." (Agnes Lam, academic and poet)
• "Gillian Bickley has the sharp eye and the strong stomach of the true realist. Brilliantly observed. Not even the American minimalist William Carlos Williams could zero in on and capture a detail with more panache. A thought-provoking and entertaining contribution to Hong Kong literature. Bickley succeeds in conveying the character of the Fragrant Harbour with humorous rigour." (David Wilson, Sunday Morning Post)
• In For the Record Gillian Bickley inhabits a world of movement, traffic, construction and buildings, but her poetry sees through this to a nature of flying, singing birds and lush green trees existing in harmony or sometimes at odds with modern day Hong Kong. Her work offers a counterpoint of the survival and continuity of nature against which our busy everyday lives are measured. Bickley's Hong Kong is both a universal and a personal one and, like Italo Calvino's book The City, she captures a Hong Kong of the mind, the one city that we all share as a physical space against the myriad cities that we experience and perceive distinctly as our own. She skillfully fuses the human and the natural world". (Dave McKirdy, poet, The Asian Review of Books)

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