Main Street Rag  2019

Marion Starling Boyer’s The Sea was Never Far functions as oral history, dramatic monologue, personal mythology, biography framed by white space, and a novel in verse—but thankfully, it is poetry, salt-tinged and music-lush as the sea. Each poem  is an act of lyric ingenuity, offering up a particular voice within the realm of a particular place and time, revived by Boyer’s attention and magic. 

Diane Seuss

           Marion Boyer cannot exist. No one person could give such voice to fishermen, millers, widows, thatchers, herring girls, compass adjustors. An entire community rises from the pages of The Sea Was Never Far, not as pale and whispering ghosts, but as individuals with nicknames and failings and skills and stories that invade your head and become your memories. 

     Whether Marion Boyer is ventriloquist or necromancer or medium, it is certain that she is a poet.               

Susan Blackwell Ramsey

Winner of the 2014 Grayson Books Poetry Chapbook Competition

Finishing Line Press    2003

Mayapple Press  2009