Mary Michaels has spent much of her life in London. However, it was while working in the Midlands after completing an arts degree at Bristol University that she started writing. Living for a while in Philadelphia, she was one of the city’s ‘New Studies Poets’ and also worked in a collective producing a weekly programme on poetry for public service radio. Back in Britain she was part of ‘Sister-Seven’ whose feminist multimedia project is included in the Tate Britain exhibition ‘Women in Revolt!’. Then coordinator of ‘Soundings’, a series of monthly poetry readings at 44 Portland Place.
 
Her writing has been attracting attention and prizes over a number of years. She is represented in numerous magazines and anthologies including Poetry Review and three of the Arts Council New Poetry series. Her pamphlet Safe, Safe was deemed one of the best of its year by Poetry London and her New and Selected Poems, The Shape of the Rock, was selected for the first Alternative New Generation list.
 
Her most recent publication Games of Soldiers (Sea Cow Press, 2023) follows two collections of prose fictions, My Life in Films (2006) and Squint (2011), both from The Other Press. Her seventh poetry pamphlet Caret Mark was brought out by Hearing Eye in 2008.
 
Review comments:
 

By turns disturbing, celebratory, compassionate and visionary, these poems are consistently well crafted and engaging. A witty, teasing skirmish with life and its languages, this book is highly recommended.

 

Hannah Stone, Dreamcatcher, on Games of Soldiers

 
 

Totally enthralling …

 

Many Pannett, Tears in the Fence, on Games of Soldiers

 
 

The reader can feel that they are being escorted through a world with its own internal consistency … subtle and insinuating … fresh shades of meaning may be found on repeated re-readings.

 

Thomas Ovans, London Grip, on Games of Soldiers

 
 

Filled with an unsettling drama which throws up a whole lot of questions… this impressive collection is probing, feminist in its outlook yet not easily reduced to an argument or a thesis

 

Steve Spence, Litter, on Games of Soldiers

 
 

The poems are filled with life … they are thought-provoking and strange, and Mary Michaels has a wonderful ear for the language of speech.

 

George Simmers Sphinx on Caret Mark

 
 

I’ve rarely read poems that occupy so much ground … while appearing so modest.

 

Todd Swift, Poetry London on Caret Mark.

 
 

We are rewarded by the brilliance of the metaphors, the precision of the language and, not least, for me, the wit.

 

Frances Presley on Squint.

 
 

A poetry of the nerve endings, a kind of visceral inner music.

 

Staple on The Shape of the Rock.

 
 

The book has unity and integrity, the poems are precise, pointed and contemporary in interest, and the craft is superb.

 

Poetry Scotland on The Shape of the Rock.