Dancing Dust

Poems by Mollie Caird (1922-2000)

Mollie Caird had a life-long love of poetry. She herself wrote periodically for her own enjoyment with little or no thought of publication despite having a considerable talent.

Her love and enjoyment of her family, nature, and the arts are recurring themes in her poetry; as is the frailty of the human condition in the greater scheme of things. She loved the English language: its richness of vocabulary, its potential for metaphor and other figures of speech, its popular usages, its literary heritage, and its poetic forms. In her use of it she often showed her sense of fun and the absurd.

The quality of her work received its first major acknowledgement in 1962 when her poem on the set subject The Death of Ahab won the open triennial English Poem on a Sacred Subject prize of Oxford University. She won this prize again in 1974 with The Face of God.

Between 1962 and 1972 Mollie Caird regularly contributed light verse on topical subjects to The Oxford Times. In 1983 Mollie Caird published a selection of her work as The Dancing Dust. This archetypical author's private publication was made possible by a legacy from a friend, Robert Bruce, a young man of brilliance and promise who was killed in a climbing accident in the Alps in 1979.

Poems by Mollie Caird are the copyright of her estate. Applications for permission to reproduce them should be made to the Trustees of the G.B Caird Memorial Trust, to which any royalties will be donated.

Contact: info@molliecaird.com