The Wind Stills to Listen

The Wind Stills to Listen is my third poetry collection and is published by Arlen House.

The back cover blurb gives you an idea of its themes:

‘This modern-day mystic brings an often-heartrending clarity to her sequence of poems about Mary Magdalene. Elsewhere, poems about the loss of a baby in utero and “the dead in the earth” are especially moving, bringing home what a spiritual miracle life in a physical body really is. The vividly-expressed desire to “heal with love, not miracles” and the search for the transcendent infuse this collection.’

- Lucy Caldwell

Deirdre Cartmill had two heart attacks in a week at the age of forty-three. Utterly powerless, she wondered, ‘is this it? Am I going to die now?’ This experience shaped The Wind Stills to Listen, her third poetry collection. These poems occupy the liminal space between living and dying, light and dark, hope and despair. They dive unflinchingly into grief and loss, explore boundaries and thresholds, open to the fragile promise of love, and let us hear the voice of Mary Magdalene sing out. With a deft musicality and forensic attention to detail, she captures the vulnerability, the wounds, the possibility, and the transcendent beauty of life in all its emotional complexity. What does it mean to live? What does it mean to love? What does it mean to have faith in something greater?

‘The Wind Stills to Listen is a collection that is unafraid to look into the dark, to speak of heartbreak and of what it means to be human and mortal. It also holds seeds of hope, moving into a celebration of “love as a miracle” (Blossom) and through the story of Mary Magdalene, Cartmill engages us all in an encounter with the divine.’

- Moyra Donaldson

‘…a poet undaunted by examining even the darkest of moments, of trying to describe, understand and finally learn from loss and what it means… Her work is vital, accessible and should be read.’

- Culture Northern Ireland

Contact me if you’d like to buy a signed copy. You can also buy the book in Waterstones, No Alibis and online at Blackwells.