{"id":1461,"date":"2025-08-06T08:04:59","date_gmt":"2025-08-06T12:04:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/marygilliland.com\/new_staging\/?page_id=1461"},"modified":"2025-09-19T19:46:23","modified_gmt":"2025-09-19T23:46:23","slug":"the-ruined-walled-castle-garden","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/marygilliland.com\/?page_id=1461","title":{"rendered":"The Ruined Walled Castle Garden"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Image\"<\/span><\/div>
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Purchase The Ruined Walled Castle Garden<\/em><\/div>
Bright Hill Press<\/span><\/div><\/div><\/a>
Signed Copy<\/span><\/div><\/div><\/a><\/div>
Beginning with the forest wanderings of a mentally lost father in the twentieth century, and ending with Eve\u2019s original choice of wisdom over obedience,\u00a0<\/span>The Ruined Walled Castle Garden<\/strong>\u2018s 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.<\/span><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

By turns mystical and realist, Mary Gilliland\u2019s intensely musical poems consider global apocalypse \u2014 \u201cour course set for the destitute sunset\u201d \u2014 but also celebrate the generative power of creativity, honoring the passion of cobbler, novelist, saint, inventor, photographer. With preternatural empathy, she enters fascinating sensibilities \u2014 Virginia Woolf, Nikola Tesla \u2014 and sings \u201cthe troubled music\u201d of history, a frontier that extends from fabled to factual, from the Hesperides to the moon, resorts to war zones. Gilliland\u2019s sinewy, nuanced poems understand earth \u2014 and consciousness \u2014\u00a0 as gardens that no walls or enchantments can protect. Her vision is profound, enduring.<\/i><\/i><\/p>\n

ALICE FULTON<\/p><\/div><\/div>

Mary Gilliland\u2019s The Ruined Walled Castle Garden, marked by\u00a0an energy of compression,\u00a0a surprise and originality of\u00a0language, casts a sidelong glance at the human comedy in various times and places. Here a \u201cstubbled saint\u201d stumbles into our contemporary world; a monk\u2019s \u201cbrass scale tips:\/one pan sways with the bitterness of interrupted life,\/the other, Eve\u2019s radical helplessness\u201d. 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 \u201cwhere-were-you party\u201d caught by the infinitives of possibility.<\/i><\/i><\/p>\n

MARY CROW<\/p>\n

Like the apothecarist Keats, Mary Gilliland\u2019s poetry wells up from the healing force of unheard melodies. Her tensile lyric and fluent narrative grasp the sweet otherness in life, which is \u201cEve\u2019s radical helplessness\u201d to endure and bear intimate witness to both change and permanence. The Ruined Walled Castle Garden is a radiant testimony\u2014and a triumph\u2014of an unerring ear I deeply cherish.<\/i><\/i><\/p>\n

ISHION HUTCHINSON<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

The Ruined Walled Castle Garden Book Launch<\/div>