Sybil: The Glide of her Tongue
Lesbians are often told that we have no culture, that we have no history, and yet lesbians are always rediscovering hidden histories, literary traditions, codes and behaviours that have been obscured, obliterated or proclaimed irrelevant. Sybil: The Glide of Her Tongue challenges that version of history. Gillian Hanscombe has written an exhilarating and richly textured collection of poems.
1992 | ISBN 9781875559053 | Paperback | 198 x 130 mm | 101 pp
Reviews
'Gillian Hanscombe is one of the most insightfully ironic, deliciously lyrical voices we have writing amongst us today.'
–Betsy Warland
Gillian Hanscombe’s Sybil speaks and spells with the voice of a revisioning prophecy.
–Rose Lucas, Australian Women’s Book Review, Vol 4.2
'Gillian Hanscombe performs a feat of lesbian imagination in this stunning sequence. Her sybilic voice, familiar and strange at once, radiates both vision and anger in prose that echoes the music of our thoughts back to us.'
–Daphne Marlatt
'Sybil: The Glide of Her Tongue is a prophetic fugue in lesbian past, present and future times. Sybilline tidings of lesbian existence.'
–Mary Meigs
'Gillian Hanscombe's poetry opens up meaning in such a way that it provides for beauty and awareness, for a space where one says yes to a lesbian we of awareness.'
–Nicole Brossard
'Sybil is an exciting and compelling work. It is hard to think of any poet in Australia who can equal Hanscombe's virtuosity and power.'
–Bev Roberts, Australian Book Review