MARY PALMER Edited by Jay Ramsay Foreword by Jeremy Hooker Introduction by Kevan Manwaring
Knowing her end was near, Mary Palmer worked on her poems – compiling her very best and writing new ones with a feverish intensity. This is the result, published here with her cooperation and consent, thanks to the commitment of her friends and support of her family. These are poems from the extreme edge and very centre of life – words of light that defy death’s shadow with a startling intensity, clarity and honesty. Containing poems from across Mary’s career, selected by Jay Ramsay, Tidal Shift is an impressive legacy from a poet of soul and insight.
Cover art by Ione Parkin
Tidal Shift: selected poems
POETRY Royalties to Dorothy House Hospice
‘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
'Tidal Shift reveals to us a woman for whom writing poetry was a
necessary way of expressing the whole of her being, body and mind,
spirit and passions.'
Jeremy Hooker
'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
'full of excellencies'
Rowan Williams
'sometimes burning with fierce irony, elsewhere disarmingly tender yet steadily maintaining a courageous gaze in the face of others' suffering.' Helen Moore