For the Record - Abridged

Summary

This collection of poems was 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. Those who have emigrated or who have spent a period of time overseas will empathise with the expatriate experience described. Other poems narrate and reflect on personal events and concerns which will resonate with many. 

“Gillian Bickley has the sharp eye and strong stomach of the true realist. ... brilliantly observed.... ‘Tobacco’ is about as close as any poet comes to word-perfect... 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, 21 September 2003

“In For the Record and other Poems of Hong Kong, 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, 21 September 2003.