Black Moss Press - Marilyn Gear Pilling

Marilyn Gear Pilling lives in Hamilton and grew up in Waterloo, Ontario, but her roots are in Huron County.

Pilling's short fiction and poetry have won and been shortlisted for national awards and her poetry has been broadcast on CBC radio.

teaches part time at McMaster University. The Toronto Star described Pilling as having "a poet's gift for unlocking the strangeness beneath the familiar."

The Life of the Four Stomachs

Marilyn Gear Pilling’s latest collection, The Life of the Four Stomachs, is an ingeniously humourous yet passionate look at "the glorious mess of life/the guts the mud the smite the blood the song the sob/of life. " Through tales of sensuality, heartbreak, and laughter, the writer, the lover, the daughter, and the friend emerge and fuse together in an experience all their own. In these poems, Pilling explores the relationships between the human, vegetal and the animal worlds with one penetrating voice and one striking personality. From pea pods to cow cud, Pilling finds the familiar in the foreign, the animal nature in all of us, and life somewhere in between. Her words and images take us on an unpredictable journey from rural Ontario farmlands to the dazzling "breasts of La Bourgogne," painting pictures of what we’ve always known and what we all yearn to see.

Poetry, Paperback, 85 pages, $17
ISBN 0-88753-426-0

The Field Next To Love

In the inner landscape of this poet, the field of the familiar is next to the field of love, so close that she can’t at times tell them apart. In her exploration of these spaces and their relationship to one another, the poet touches on themes of childhood, family, mortality, bonds undiminished by time and separation, and adult love. Deeply rooted in one Canadian woman’s experience, this collection speaks to men and women alike about the questions that matter.

Poetry, 96 pages, $17.95
ISBN 0-88753-364-7

The Writer

In the washroom
cubicle of the
Primrose Hotel
on Jarvis
releasing my waters
to the underground
river

I tilt my head
Backwards

discover
the ceiling to be
a mirror
vast and dark
and there in that mirror
a row of strangers
heads bowed
cell upon cell of
stygian figures
bent to their work
my upturned face
alone among bowed
heads
seeing
as a god sees