Valerie Gillies: Inscriptions in the Wind

This article focuses on Valerie Gillies’s contribution to women’s poetry through an examination of her 2016 exhibition, A Garden of Time and Silence, with textile artist Anna S. King, at Dawyck Botanic Gardens in the Scottish Borders. While Gillies is an acclaimed print-page poet, this piece represents her skill at alternative uses of poetry. Throughout her career, Gillies has employed collaborative multimedia art to engage in contemporary political discussion, often on the environment, in order to challenge, more directly than is possible with print text, poetry’s gendered assumptions.