Daphne Gloag was born in Cheshire in 1933 but has lived nearly all her life near London. Although she read classics and philosophy at Oxford she spent most of her working life in medical editing and journalism, winning a prize from the Medical Journalists Association. She was married to a poet, the late Peter Williamson.
 
Her poetry has been widely published, especially since her retirement, in magazines and in anthologies. Among her prizes and commendations are first prizes in a Poetry on the Lake competition (the Silver Wyvern award), a Scintilla competition, and a Second Light long poem competition. Many poems have been translated into Italian and a few published in Italy, and an article about her work was published in the Italian journal Humanitas.
 
Her collection Diversities of Silence was published in 1995 by Brentham Press and A Compression of Distances by Cinnamon Press in 2009. This is described by John Latham as ‘without question an important collection’ – ‘A distinctive voice’, writes Myra Schneider, ‘both enquiring and lyrical, which affirms life and celebrates love’.
 
The chief focus of Daphne’s work in poetry has been for some time a long poem sequence, entitled Beginnings, with cosmology as its setting though it is basically personal. Three of the poems reproduced here are taken from it, and it will be the core of a new collection scheduled to be published in 2013.