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Under the Blue Seraphim is my fourth poetry collection and is published byArlen House.
The back cover text gives you an insight into its themes:
Deirdre Cartmill’s fourth collection Under the Blue Seraphim explores the tension between her intimate spiritual experiences and the vestiges of her childhood faith. Many of the poems were inspired by her time as writer-in-residence for Belfast Cathedral. They interrogate those moments where life swings from dark to light, and the razor’s edge between inner and outer realities, belonging and aloneness, loss and hope. A longer sequence ‘Lightpath’ captures the visions and vivid experiences of her inner meditative journeys. These poems quietly and gently question what it means to believe in something higher and what that calls you to become.
In Under the Blue Seraphim, Deirdre Cartmill charts a journey from grief and doubt to renewed faith and spiritual regeneration. Loss of loved ones, of homelands, of self, catalyses a spiritual quest for understanding and acceptance under the auspices of the watchful, guiding Blue Seraphim – angel wardens that are at once otherworldly and intrinsic to the creative process. Though the poet has travelled to ‘a deeper place/where words weren’t needed’ she is ultimately ‘returned to the song of my ancestors’. In these graceful, glowing poems of prayer and pilgrimage, Deirdre urges us to see and think differently about the worlds around and within us, to follow the ‘light paths’ that lead from despair and alienation to healing, wholeness and ecstatic union with a ‘Greater Light’.
- Kathleen McCracken
In Under the Blue Seraphim, Deirdre Cartmill proves herself unafraid to tackle spiritual issues. It is a collection that reflects on the nature of faith and belief; about finding a way forward even when lost in the confusion of grief, pain and doubt. The poems are a journeying to an understanding.
Lightpath, the long sequence that makes up the second half of the book, sees the poet bring readers along on her spiritual pilgrimage, through the four elements, those fundamental forces, and through visionary and shamanic encounters, before full circling to her realisation that - ‘… what I searched for was always here with me’.
- Moyra Donaldson
Contact me if you’d like to buy a signed copy.
*Thank you to Amira McDonagh for letting me use her beautiful image ‘Strength in the Waiting’ for the book cover.
Under the Blue Seraphim is my fourth poetry collection and is published byArlen House.
The back cover text gives you an insight into its themes:
Deirdre Cartmill’s fourth collection Under the Blue Seraphim explores the tension between her intimate spiritual experiences and the vestiges of her childhood faith. Many of the poems were inspired by her time as writer-in-residence for Belfast Cathedral. They interrogate those moments where life swings from dark to light, and the razor’s edge between inner and outer realities, belonging and aloneness, loss and hope. A longer sequence ‘Lightpath’ captures the visions and vivid experiences of her inner meditative journeys. These poems quietly and gently question what it means to believe in something higher and what that calls you to become.
In Under the Blue Seraphim, Deirdre Cartmill charts a journey from grief and doubt to renewed faith and spiritual regeneration. Loss of loved ones, of homelands, of self, catalyses a spiritual quest for understanding and acceptance under the auspices of the watchful, guiding Blue Seraphim – angel wardens that are at once otherworldly and intrinsic to the creative process. Though the poet has travelled to ‘a deeper place/where words weren’t needed’ she is ultimately ‘returned to the song of my ancestors’. In these graceful, glowing poems of prayer and pilgrimage, Deirdre urges us to see and think differently about the worlds around and within us, to follow the ‘light paths’ that lead from despair and alienation to healing, wholeness and ecstatic union with a ‘Greater Light’.
- Kathleen McCracken
In Under the Blue Seraphim, Deirdre Cartmill proves herself unafraid to tackle spiritual issues. It is a collection that reflects on the nature of faith and belief; about finding a way forward even when lost in the confusion of grief, pain and doubt. The poems are a journeying to an understanding.
Lightpath, the long sequence that makes up the second half of the book, sees the poet bring readers along on her spiritual pilgrimage, through the four elements, those fundamental forces, and through visionary and shamanic encounters, before full circling to her realisation that - ‘… what I searched for was always here with me’.
- Moyra Donaldson
Contact me if you’d like to buy a signed copy.
*Thank you to Amira McDonagh for letting me use her beautiful image ‘Strength in the Waiting’ for the book cover.