Games and prizes, land and research
have waylaid your prodigal feet.
I don’t want to hold you up. But I do.
The arc of history could bend with you.
New poetry collection from Cornell author Mary Gilliland
Mary Gilliland brings to her work the rich flavors of the natural world, yet her destination is clearly news of the inner self, its perceptions, its relationships with others. She is not afraid of delight, neither does she shirk the hard tasks of anger, pain, and deep caring.
Mary Oliver
Like the apothecarist Keats, Mary Gilliland’s poetry wells up from the healing force of unheard melodies. Her tensile lyric and fluent narrative grasp the sweet otherness in life, which is “Eve’s radical helplessness” to endure and bear intimate witness to both change and permanence…a radiant testimony—and a triumph—of an unerring ear I deeply cherish. Mythical and grounded, her sensuously rich language enacts a poetry in which self-concentration brims beyond the far reach of desire, passion, and the self.
Ishion Hutchinson
At once eco-sensual and erudite, Gilliland writes a nuanced poetry that richly investigates humanity’s contradictory capacities to destroy and to love. From first to last, I am spellbound by the largesse of vision and the beauty.
Cynthia Hogue
Gilliland has continued to develop as a poet of high intelligence, considerable originality, and quiet intensity….whose work is consistently fresh and exploratory, in form as well as in substance.
Stanley Kunitz
By turns mystical and realist, Mary Gilliland’s intensely musical poems consider global apocalypse—“our course set for the destitute sunset”—but also celebrate the generative power of creativity, honoring the passion of cobbler, novelist, saint, inventor, photographer. With preternatural empathy, she enters fascinating sensibilities—Virginia Woolf, Nikola Tesla—and sings “the troubled music” of history, a frontier that extends from fabled to factual, from the Hesperides to the moon, from resorts to war zones. Her vision is profound, enduring.
ALICE FULTON
Woolf’s pen runs dry, Tesla holes up, Lincoln emerges in yet another bardo, and the rest of us tunnel through Wednesday’s jammed boulevards, Friday’s cash worthless, Saturday’s prodigal feet. The poems of Ember Days feature soldiers under duress, models transformed to artists, descendants of forced immigrants, survivors of hurricanes, witnesses for peace—stepping up to our world’s disasters, leveling with its possibilities, interrogating faith, justice, militarism, madness, and the perception and affection of intimate relationships.
Find out about Mary’s life, listen to her read poetry, see her gallery, and news