Graced with an inexhaustible love for her legendary husband, poet Paul Carroll, Maryrose Carroll shares memories and her musical bonds about this love which continues beyond death. A love which James Dickey wrote her on Paul's death-allows us to "be with Paul on both sides of the shadow line." The poems in this debut collection sprouted out, like water from a spring, after she finished her first book, BEATS ME, a telling of their life together and Paul's success in battling attempted censorship by the US Post Office when he published new writing by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Wm. S. Burroughs in 1959. BEATS ME was selected as one of The Notable 100 Indie Books, 2015 by Shelf Unlimited Magazine. Conversations with a Dead Lover fell immediately into a pattern, quatrains punctuated with a refrain, almost as lyrics. Her musical style preceded the Nobel Prize award to Bob Dylan, and indeed, Paul Carroll had attempted to recognize Dylan as a poet, in 1968, by inviting him to be part of the publication of Young American Poets. Earl LeClaire has noted that in Maryrose Carroll's Conversations of a Dead Lover, "the poems are at once, a mystery, a love story and a blend of observations and explorations that pull us into uncharted waters." While a North Carolina Poet Laureate, Joseph Bathanti wrote "This is a book of breathtaking candor, the poet's seemingly limitless threshold for apprehending a love intensely physical, but also mystical, of another plane, of nuanced touch and texture, a love that accrues only by abiding the earth's lore and orbit, yet reckons that unseen world beyond our ken. Maryrose has also been awarded as a "Runner-Up, 2016 Best Indie Book by Shelf Unbound Magazine for publishing God & Other Poems, the Final Poems, written by her husband, Paul Carroll, in the last ten weeks of his life. A sculptor for four decades she has sculpted very large (up to 45 feet tall) public sculptures permanently sited in San Diego, River Grove, and Springfield, Illinois as well as Charlotte, Hickory, and Fayetteville, North Carolina. She is currently writing a book of humorous vignettes: Shall We Laugh? Wouldn't You Rather? She moved, with Paul Carroll, from Chicago to a farm tucked in the Appalachian Mountains spitting distance from Tennessee and NC State Park, Grandfather Mountain, near Linville, North Carolina. Her poetry reading tours have included The Poetry Center in Chicago, and libraries and coffee shops in North Carolina.
