The Overview Effect

"As Ezra Pound had it, poetry is the news that stays news and The Overview Effect, Emily Wills's marvellous third collection is just that - unflinching, tender, ruefully intelligent and richly detailed life studies that lift the heart."

- Michael Laskey

"In these wise, tender and profound poems, Emily Wills does indeed use her pen as 'a scalpel of sorts' to dissect the 'intricate things' of the past and present. Her experiences as a medical student and GP, together with life with an artist mother, imbue the poems with a feminist sensibility and ironic humour. There is a tremendous energy in Wills's use of language. These are poems about noticing things, recording them and making the personal political. They are full of detail - an artist's eye is at work here, together with the doctor's desire for accuracy - perceptive details for the reader to revel in. Wills is an important poetic voice, full of humanity, intelligence and delight."

- Alicia Stubbersfield

"There is a wonderful story-telling nature to this book that brims with poems that are nostalgic at times without being sentimental, which take an 'overview effect of the whole', seeking to harness and capture the many chapters of a rich life, while looking on to the afterlife with hope, imagining the first green leaf on the moon. Wills is a fine observer with a mature wit and wry humour, as well as an often surprising but yet so accurate turn of phrase, from 'marsh marigolds flourishing in renal dialysis' to a rabbit's 'luxuriant ears protruding from convenient holes', from the 'varnished heartbreak of violins' to the smallness of 'the jarred, aborted, cherry's heart'."

- Paul Stephenson

The Overview Effect

Emily Wills