Poems from “And other poems”, “The North”, “Magma”, etc., mostly about the trials of first-time motherhood. The earlier poems are packed with imagery. The fragmentary “Birth notes” ends with “Tree frog in my lap,/ wet limbs folded, preparing/ to draw first breath … /// A slick coating for vernix./ Snow melting before a frost”. The more coherent “Placenta” has “everything you need to build a world,/ and all without a drop of blood” and “nine months from cyst to city”. I like "Pupae" too.
After the birth, social pressure and the long lists of advice put strain on the narrator. On p.44, "Ball python wife" begins with "It's happening again". She feels her skin turning to scales, her eyes becoming lidless and milky. Near the end "I want to tell you I am scared/ but my tongue has split open".
By Xmas, things are worse. "And peace to men on earth" ends with "O glitter bauble family/ in secret overcast,/ then bright eyes sing to ravaged was/ and weeks to later first".
"Scenes from our bed" comprises 6 near-haiku, from the mundane "The rumbling trains./ Our slumbering neighbourhood/ underneath a mackerel sky" to the good "Rain on our window./ Rain on our baby's window/ through the monitor".
"The body remembers" ends with "but the body remembers/ that early autumn morning// red cloud in the bowl// never wanting anything more in your whole useless life/ brow pressed against cold tile".
"Live action role-play" includes "At the front door, the rickshaw driver and the kangaroo/ flip a coin to see who gets the morning shift./ ... Where the herbalist was sitting there is now/ a four-poster bed. Solidarity, says the cow from her stall." The cow and some other themes link the fragmentary stanzas.
"Boat" is a sestina.
"In the lily room" (longlisted in the 2023 NPC) is 2 pages of couplets - "Lilies are to living/ as rocks are to raccoons. Rock on!// ... We pick up the grains of rice one by one, like astronauts".
By p.75 we've reached "Last feed". On p.76 "we'll tell tell stories in bed,/ where all of the past counts as yesterday". There's been little mention of the father.
I like the variety of approaches I soon came to trust the poet even when I didn't understand everything. Sometimes there's a clear narrative. When there's obscurity it's sometimes radical, sometimes solvable. Fragmentation can be on various scales - word, sentence, stanza.
The Notes are useful. I needed to be told that "Birth notes" is a 36-verse kasen renga chain with seasonal words in each verse and verses at specific points that refer to the moon or flowers.
The graphics do little for me.
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