Mrs. Carmichael

Silcock Ruth

A first collection with a strong atmosphere and a distinctive voice. "Mrs. Carmichael" brings together poems written over the past twenty years. A house collapsing in the night, the wives of the Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi, social misfits of several kinds, William Cowper's pet hares – Ruth Silcock's subjects are often unusual. She is drawn to the neglected, peculiar or unnoticed, and brings the situations, people and places in her poems to life with humour, adroit observation and great dexterity in unfamiliar verse patterns.

About the Author

Ruth Silcock, born in Manchester in 1926, read English at Girton College, Cambridge. She later became a psychiatric social worker, working with both adults and children. She also published several children's books as well as her three collections of poems. A successful radio play, "46 Nursing Homes", was based on a sequence of her poems from "A Wonderful View of the Sea". She lived in Oxfordshire and died in 2014.

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