New

ISBN	9781991240170
Pages	168
Dimensions	191x140 mm
Published	2023
Publisher	Hands-On Books, South Africa
Format	Paperback

Messenger

by Barbara Fairhead

The poems in Messenger, written late in life reveal a meditative appreciation of the natural world on her doorstep, and a profound questioning of previously held beliefs.

Here is a collection that speaks eloquently, beautifully, passionately of a life well lived. It is in its way a distillation of wisdom and insight into all that life throws at us. Eight decades of how to survive with the help of beauty, art, language. Barbara Grenfell is just the guru, the sage, the shaman we so urgently need right now!

-Julian Roup, UK journalist and writer

Barbara Fairhead leaves us in no doubt as to the collective and deeply personal significance of the Messenger as the midwife of the shedding of our final skin. In these raw, uncaged verses, she greets that ancient emissary of death and life with a wild eye... fierce and to the point. She speaks her truth with both reverence and rage. Her poems are both a homecoming and honouring of the seasons of life as if they were within her ...'How beautiful the leaves, even in their dying! Her words speak to me and for me.

-lan McCallum

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About the Author

Barbara Fairhead

Barbara Grenfell Fairhead is an artist, writer, poet and lyricist. She was born in the United Kingdom in 1939 and has lived most of her life in South Africa. After her first visit to New Mexico in the early 1990s it became her second home. She made many extended visits over a period of twenty years, staying in her casita close to Black Mesa. Many of her poems and haiku were inspired by that landscape, as well as some of her prose writings, and her trilogy of novels. She lives in Cape Town now. Her most recent books are Rio Abajo Rio/River Beneath River – a poetically written, post-creation myth and KIN, her collected poems.