My father once wore one shoe and one slipper
pressing star moss and vole tracks
walking steep land
A stubbled saint fizzling in a twentieth century
incarnation, afraid to use
the cellar stair….
Recent award-winning poetry by Cornell author Mary Gilliland
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, resorts to war zones. Gilliland’s sinewy, nuanced poems understand earth — and consciousness — as gardens that no walls or enchantments can protect. Her vision is profound, enduring.
Alice Fulton
Mary Gilliland’s The Ruined Walled Castle Garden, marked by an energy of compression, a surprise and originality of language, casts a sidelong glance at the human comedy in various times and places. Here a “stubbled saint” stumbles into our contemporary world; a monk’s “brass scale tips:/one pan sways with the bitterness of interrupted life,/the other, Eve’s radical helplessness”. In these poems, a confident and eloquent voice cuts to the essential where the rush of life stops the speaker in the doorway of a “where-were-you party” caught by the infinitives of possibility.
Mary Crow
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. The Ruined Walled Castle Garden is a radiant testimony—and a triumph—of an unerring ear I deeply cherish.
Ishion Hutchinson
Beginning with the forest wanderings of a mentally lost father in the twentieth century, and ending with Eve’s original choice of wisdom over obedience, The Ruined Walled Castle Garden‘s lyrics are spoken by or about actual historical figures such as Lizzie Borden, Emma Mille, Nikola Tesla, Virginia Woolf, and by unidentified representative contemporaries who work in a factory or model for an art class, visit Doha or Baghdad, weed a Scottish garden, walk beneath a New York winter sky.
Find out about Mary’s life, listen to her read poetry, see her gallery, and news