| Original language | English |
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| Place of Publication | London |
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| Publisher | Green Bottle Press |
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| Publication status | Published - 2018 |
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'Gail McConnell's poems about creatures – worm, narwhal, octopus, curlew – remind us, in their metamorphic strategies, that we are all creatures of one kind or another, who can embody and transform ourselves and each other through language. As the great French poet Francis Ponge has it in his ‘Mollusc’, ‘The least cell of our body clings as tightly to language, as language has us in its grip.’ There are echoes of Ponge in Gail McConnell, and of Marianne Moore, but she is very much her own person in her emotional range. Poems that deal with issues of the utmost gravity – matters of life and death – nevertheless display a rueful lightness of touch. Fourteen is a seriously entertaining sequence of things.’ Ciaran Carson
