The poet & the collections
Mary Thomson is a Renfrewshire based writer and poet. Born in Cheshire, her working life in Yorkshire was spent in the arts as a curator, critic, gallery owner and writer, before moving to Scotland in 2006.
She has published four collections of her poems and makes handmade books of collections and individual poems. In 2009 and 2010 she exhibited at By Leaves We Live at the Scottish Poetry Library, at the Scottish Pamphlet Poetry event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival and at the Scottish International Artists Bookfair in Glasgow. In 2010 she read at the Ilkley Literature Festival, and will do so again in 2011 when she will present a two-woman show based on her new collection, A KINDNESS OF WOMEN with her daughter, actress Cathy Sara.
The genesis of the latest collection SOME CONSEQUENCES OF SAYING YES was a brief encounter between two married people in 1979: their first and last meeting for 25 years. Then he (a Scot) set out to find her (in Yorkshire); she was found. In 2006 reader, she married him and came to live in Scotland. These poems describe and celebrate some aspects of the ultimate consequences of that long-ago saying “Yes”.
Newly published, the poems in A KINDNESS OF WOMEN explore six decades of a woman’s experience, reflecting on motherhood, the values women put on kindness and jam-making, generosity and friendship. Women in art and history have also inspired poems as well as the legacies women pass on to each other. Pamphlet designed by Den Stubbs and hand stitched, £5
HEARTWOOD is a recently made collection of poems written for the exhibition Secret Life of Trees which took place in North Yorkshire in 2002 in which a painter, photographer, sculptor and the poet celebrated trees of significance to them, in particular a venerable Nidderdale oak. Handmade and stitched, printed on art papers, signed. £5
AT THE MARGINS (as Mary Sara) published by Hawksworth Art in 2003. A collection culled from over 20 years writing – and a celebration of Nidderdale. Signed. ISBN 0-9544521-1-9 £5
Click the images to see a poem from each collection:
