Inside the Brightness of Red

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This is Mary MacRae's second, posthumously published, collection. It includes fierce, poignant work written when she was terminally ill, also a range of beautiful lyric poems on themes which include childhood, youth, relations with parents, marriage, friendship and her responses to art and nature. Her work deserves wider recognition. Few contemporary writers can match her accuracy of eye, strength of feeling, tenderness and sense of the transitory nature of experience. No-one writes more affectingly about change and fleeting impressions.
“We cannot read Mary without becoming her, so strong is her empathy with all living things, so intense her desire to be fully alive, so palpable her sense of mortality. This is the gift of her imagination: to become the object of her looking, be it bird, flower, light, shadow, and, in turn, to gift us with her poetry of transformation. Hers was a unifying vision which produced an extraordinarily coherent body of work, a true wedding of spiritual and material worlds and, unobtrusively, of form and content.” – Mimi Khalvati
“Covering a wide range of themes, her poems are connected by their fidelity to ‘experience, events’ and are distinguished by what I have to call tact, both in the poise and restraint with which human truths and secrets are conveyed, but also in the further sense of the tactile…This touch is heart-touch, employed with great skill and restraint, devoid of sentimentality or self-regard.” – Penelope Shuttle on As Birds Do.