Selima Hill's poetry has been called wanton, wildly imaginative, tender, intelligent, dangerous, defiant, subversive and startling. All these qualities are strongly present throughout Gloria, a comprehensive selection drawn from ten formally diverse and thematically unified collections, each offering wild variations on her abiding themes: women's identities, love and loss, repression and abuse, family conflict and mental illness, men, animals and human civilisation.

Gloria covers Selima Hill's first ten books, from Saying Hello at the Station (1984) to Red Roses (2006). It includes Violet (1997), which was shortlisted for all three of the UK's major poetry prizes, the Forward Prize, T.S. Eliot Prize and Whitbread Poetry Award, and Bunny (2001), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award and was also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her later collections are available in separate editions from Bloodaxe.