Today I have the pleasure of welcoming fellow member of the Poetry Society of the Open University, Julie Anne Gilligan, to reflect on her new collection Time Matters (Dempsey and Windle, 2022).

The poems in Time Matters are a mixture of memoir, vignette and reflection. There are various subjects and poetic forms: villanelles, pantoums, mirror, ekphrastic, prose and found, relating to different aspects of time.

Storytime opens the sequence. It is a simplistic title, which could lead anywhere. This is deliberate. I think the title of a poem is the key to the door of understanding, my own as much as that of any reader. My poems may have working titles but often the final title emerges from the editing process and may change several times in the development of a poem and any future variations of that poem. Even a last minute change from ‘Matters of Time’ to ‘Time…