Journey in shades – Reviewed Summer 2015

This first volume of poems by Ockham’s Mary Pargeter is an exquisite feast of childhood memories, states of love and life reflections. She writes with the lightness of petals falling on water, yet underscoring the mildness is an honesty that surprises with its intensity. Pargeter, a successful graphic designer, isn’t afraid to wear her heart on her sleeve. “Winter Daffodils” lays bare the reality of loves “sparse return” from a relationship “fatally destined to fail”, while in “Your dark Doorway” she is the victim wounded by “the cut of betrayal” from a lover’s treachery. There is pain from the loss of the adored mother who was “as near to a girl as I remember you”: the wistful yearning for a time of innocence when Pargeter was the village girl “on the windswept hill”: and the admission of “careless cruelty” towards a former partner, with the pleading hope he’ll remember the past “without bitterness”. Her openness is disarming, yet it’s that very quality which gives Mary Pargeter’s writing a lasting, appealing resonance.

Author: Mary Pargeter

Publisher: GBP