"Harnessing winter's energy, I drift,
my free, wild woman's soul,
alight with day's deep desires."
An evocative, soul-stirring poetry collection for adults, by history-making theatre practitioner and Amazon best‑selling author of Bare Spirit, Susan Marshall.
In winter in Melbourne, 2024, award-winning Susan Marshall set herself a challenge. Outdoors, she attuned herself to the raw, living energies of the season and fostered the artistic emergence and growth of the wild soul in poetry.
What resulted is Susan's magnificent collection of 31 poems: Wild Soul: Contemporary Classical Winter Poetry, which is a tribute to her refined, globally renown, metaphysical artistry. She unleashes the soul's wild states of existence amidst: the dark, fire, fog, grey, light, rain, ice, snow, starkness, storm, stillness and silence of winter.
Susan fuses contemporary metaphysical poetry with the conventions of classical literary styles, including: Romanticism (Wild Woman Soul, Winter Solstice's Secret, Beats of Wander, Wild Love, Stoic Solitude, Harboured Love and Kiss Me with Clear Sight); Dark Romanticism (Silent Flight, Cold Frost, Quieten My Heart, Your Voice Hides, Free Soul, Hold onto My Fire Heart and A Shelter for the Soul ); Gothic (Dark Storm Melody, Stirring her Storm, Love's Wild Silhouette, Tiny, Soulful Dancer, Wild Alive and Spirit of the Light) and Steam Punk (Lost Flame of Love). Susan allures us into the wild presence, awakenings, emotions, journeys, manifestations, states and transformations of the soul with evocative, soul stirring personas, visual imagery and journeyed verses.
Also included in this collection, are metaphysical, winter poems that Susan has written to pay tribute to the city of Florence, its people and its Renaissance history. In O Sweet Florence, Unearth My Soul, she acknowledges Florence's role in helping to awaken her own wild soul and its artistry. Her poem: Wild Artist's Soul acknowledges the significant, historical emergence and growth of the Renaissance artist. Susan celebrates the soul's healing and renewal at the end of winter, in her poem: Rise of the Daffodil. She has also written eight winter Sonnets (using Pertrarchan conventions), which detail her stunning, metaphysical inspirations in both Florence and Australia.
