Publisher's Synopsis
The Daily Poems: 2014-2016 is the marriage of the two loves, poetry and collage, of one artist, Mary Ashwood. Seven years ago she committed herself to the challenge of writing a daily poem. The first year she wrote in haiku "to train myself to see with the eyes of a poet". Out of this experience she grew distrustful of metaphors, similes and flowery/poetic language which seemed to belong to an earlier age of innocence. She whittled away at poetic tools in the quest of finding poetry in everyday language: of things seen, of bits of conversation overheard, of parts of headlines from the newspaper, of collaged lines from daily journal entries- the things that in an instant struck her by their accidental poetry. The idea of the poet as seer instead of maker seemed to her to be the only position left in an age that knows everything about official poetry. The process to do this could not be codified or known before hand, but rather was discovered through openness. The creative act for Ashwood then became more about perceptions than ideas. Just as her collages operate in the space between fine art and the detritus of daily life, her most recent poems push to blur the boundaries between poetry and ordinary language.
