Tidal Shift

selected poems

mary palmer

foreword by Jeremy Hooker

Ebb tide -- syllables of light

fathom the sea. How

to translate life? Glancing up

I see the wind speaking clouds.

These are signs I cannot read.

Only love means anything

to me.

    Mary Palmer, from Tidal Shift

Knowing her end was near, Mary worked on her poems – compiling her very best and writing new material with a feverish intensity. This is the result. It is being published here with her full consent and the support of her family and hard work of her friends. These are poems from the very edge and centre of life. Words of light snatched from the penumbra of her condition, defying death’s shadow with a voice of startling intensity, clarity and honesty. An impressive legacy to a poet of soul and insight.

‘For Mary Palmer, poetry never seems like a pastime. It is a way of living, engaged and outward-looking, with the senses alert, the heart and mind reflective and intelligent. She has the courage to confront struggles and sickness, the world’s and her own. Unpious but radically spiritual, she stays faithfully questioning right to the end.’

Philip Gross

'This is writing that is totally engaged with the world. Ranging widely through extremes of place and experience, her sensuous language brings together the spiritual and sexual, the playful and painful, into a focused whole of highly crafted poetry, filled with deep compassion. Poems to challenge our deepest selves.'

Rose Flint

RRP £9.99 (£5 from every purchase will be donated to Dorothy House Hospice)

To be published by Awen Publications 8th September 2009

Launch showcase at Waterstones, Bath – with readings from family & friends

To reserve a copy email Awen here.

Taliesin’s Salmon

Old one, you caught me floundering,

pressed to rock,  an ocean of science

heavy on my head,

the weight of logic that said

there is nothing sacred, nothing.

No joy, no wonder. And love?

Love is merely an instinct,

the sticky transmission of genes

as we slither in a fishy heap, slither

towards the grave.        The grave

a yawning void

The End.

You hooked me up to lie on sheets of ice

 as you fumbled, your animal drive

 all. No love, no passion. Mechanical,

 lock-key logical, the way we coupled.

 And when I failed, faded to drab,

 as my spirit (that fiction of the brain)

 withered, you took to cloning

 to cultivating himself. Nothing sacred,

 all could be altered, tampered with,

 explained: we were computers,

 this cosmos a machine.

 The End.

 Until, one day, blind eyes opening

  to the light, I slipped through your fingers

 and down the sink, swimming drains to gain

 the place where salt water meets sweet.

 The gentle touch of wave and silt

 and silence

                               shimmered me

 smoked pink: an iridescence you, no doubt

 would have microscoped down to grey

 specks on cold flesh

                                    but a shoal gathered

 able to see, understand and believe in

 a salmon that swims free.

 Mary Palmer, from Tidal Shift