A collection of spare, contemporary poems turns heartbreak, trauma and self-doubt into a journey towards self-acceptance, using the natural world as both metaphor and emotional map.

Your Soul Is a River is a contemporary free verse poetry collection, first published in 2016. It is divided into eight sections, moving through images of the cosmos, fire, storms, the sea, wildness and the earth before arriving at healing. The premise is clear from the beginning: these poems want to accompany a reader through pain rather than merely describe it.

Gill's greatest strength is accessibility. The poems are brief, spacious and immediately legible, with recurring natural imagery giving the collection a coherent visual and emotional vocabulary. There are genuine flashes of beauty in the way she connects personal recovery with rivers, stars, oceans and seasons. The strongest poems trust an image to carry feeling without overworking it.

Unfortunately, Gill does not always trust herself that much. A recurring weakness is the tendency to explain the emotional conclusion after the metaphor has already made it perfectly clear. Several poems read more like affirmations arranged in poetic lineation than poems discovering something through language. One detailed assessment similarly noted the collection's reliance on aphorisms and its habit of telling the reader how to feel rather than leaving the emotion to emerge.

Readers coming to it after collections such as Milk and Honey or The Sun and Her Flowers will recognise the intimate, highly accessible mode, though Gill is more invested in cosmic and natural imagery than either.

The collection is uneven, but its best moments are sincerely comforting rather than merely decorative. When Gill stops explaining and lets an image breathe, the writing becomes considerably more powerful.

A gentle, readable collection with real emotional warmth, but one that too often mistakes reassurance for poetic discovery.