Deirdre Cartmill had two heart attacks in a week at the age of forty-three. This terrifying experience formed the backdrop of her third poetry collection, The Wind Stills to Listen. Occupying a liminal space between living and dying, hope and despair, the poems dive unflinchingly into grief and loss, to explore boundaries and thresholds, 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? These poems explore these questions, which can only be answered by turning to the stillness within and listening.
