Late Shift at the Pickle Factory

Mary wrote her first poem when she was four but it took her another fifty-six years to start sharing her work at poetry events, street parties and slams. She has been on television and radio as part of the Nationwide Building Society poetry ad campaign and has dished up poems all over the country as part of the Poetry Takeaway team. In 2017 she set up the “Poems not Pills” project to promote the therapeutic value of poetry for health professionals and their patients. Her debut pamphlet Happiness FM was published in 2020 and was selected as one of 10 uplifting books chosen by the NHS. Her poems have been published in a number of anthologies, websites and zines. In April 2022 Mary was featured in The Guardian regarding her experience of coming to performance poetry later in life.

An understated pathos and a highly politicised mind at work. - Jacqueline Saphra