The poems in Messenger, written late in life reveal a meditative appreciation of the natural world on her doorstep, and a profound questioning of previously held beliefs.

Here is a collection that speaks eloquently, beautifully, passionately of a life well lived. It is in its way a distillation of wisdom and insight into all that life throws at us. Eight decades of how to survive with the help of beauty, art, language. Barbara Grenfell is just the guru, the sage, the shaman we so urgently need right now!

-Julian Roup, UK journalist and writer

Barbara Fairhead leaves us in no doubt as to the collective and deeply personal significance of the Messenger as the midwife of the shedding of our final skin. In these raw, uncaged verses, she greets that ancient emissary of death and life with a wild eye... fierce and to the point. She speaks her truth with both reverence and rage. Her poems are both a homecoming and honouring of the seasons of life as if they were within her ...'How beautiful the leaves, even in their dying! Her words speak to me and for me.

-lan McCallum