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Mary Michaels
The Shape of the Rock
Sea Cow Press, 2003
28 Carysfort Road, Stoke Newington, London N16 9AL
ISBN 0-9506729-4-7
£7.95

Mary Michaels
Mary Michaels was born in London, studied Arts at Bristol University (later taking an MA in Existential Psychology) and worked in the USA and elsewhere before returning to London, where she now lives. Her poetry has been published widely in magazines and in anthologies including the Arts Council/PEN New Poetry series and most recently, Desparado Poetry: Contemporary British Verse (University of Bucharest, 2004). She has also written short fiction, of which a recent piece was selected by Lorna Tracey for Stand magazine’s special Short Fiction Issue (2004). In addition to publishing under her own imprint, Sea Cow Press, she has been involved in various co-operative literary projects and is currently joint co-ordinator of Soundings at 44 Portland Place.

Sea Cow Press
Sea Cow is a single author imprint. It came into being in the mid-70s in order to publish a piece of factual prose: an account of a woman’s arts workshop in Los Angeles, which I wanted to distribute at a feminist conference (this sixteen page pamphlet was typed up on my own electric typewriter). It became a poetry imprint a couple of years later when a prize from the Stroud Festival enabled me to have a small clutch of poems hand-set on good-quality paper. This pamphlet, In Bedar, was followed by four others at rather widely spaced intervals, the most recent being Safe, safe published in 2000. The Shape of the Rock is its first book-length production. A poet writes to be read; for their work to be engaged with – enjoyed or not enjoyed, thought over, taken issue with, perhaps. For any of
this to happen it must be available, out there in the world. This was, and remains, the objective of Sea Cow Press.