Ahead of Mothers' Day this Sunday, two Carcanet poets discuss the theme of motherhood in their work and their own personal experiences of being a mother.
On writing the title poem from Her Birth
(Extract from a longer piece: The Poet on Her Work, by Rebecca Goss, first published in The Reader, issue 47, 2012) The title poem from Her Birth begins in the hospital room in which I gave birth to Ella. As a pregnant woman, I shunned all baby books and ‘How To’ manuals. I rejected the idea of there being a ‘right way’ to have a baby. I wanted to trust my instincts. I did however find myself thinking about good omens and signs. Meeting my midwife for the first time soon revealed she had lived in my house, over twenty years ago, as a lodger. She was excited to be back in a house she once loved and I thought it could only be a good omen that she knew my home. I was very sick for the first three months of my pregnancy. Older, wiser mothers will tell you, sickness is often taken as a sign that things are progressing well.
The biggest sign of all came when I walked into the hospital room where I would give birth to Ella. A large Charles Rennie Mackintosh print of purple petunias hung above the bed. With my labour advancing and my body restless, I moved around the room, stopping to peer at the picture and breathe hard against its glass. There, beneath slim stems, I saw the word 'Walberswick' written in the artist’s hand. Walberswick is a tiny village on the Suffolk coast and a formative place in my childhood, as the poem explains. I beckoned to my husband and tapped on the glass. Everything was going to be all right.
My poems are characteristically short. ‘Her Birth’ was written a few months after Ella died and early drafts are much more detailed. In them I identify Mackintosh, I describe the flowers, I tell of champagne shared with my family in The Bell (Walberswick’s best pub), I include a midwife’s presence, I describe my husband’s trousers rolled to his shins as he enters the water to scatter Ella’s ashes. All of that was cut. I wanted to concentrate on the actions: my body ‘buckling’ in labour, the ashes being collected, the driving, the scattering, the unstoppable waves. I wanted to propel the poem forward from that place of anticipation and excitement to the revelation that we only had Ella for a short time.
I had to think long and hard about how to describe Ella’s ashes. I didn’t want the poem to be littered with funereal language. I didn’t want to use the words ashes, undertaker or urn. They felt too heavy for this poem and too adult; they felt associated with adult deaths. This poem is about a child, so the language had to be different. The idea of herbs came after thinking about the slight contents of the sachet. I wanted to describe her mass becoming almost nothing at all. Something so small you could hold it in one hand. The quote in the last two lines of the poem is exactly what I said on that beach. Up until that point, Ella had been so far away from me since she’d died. As a tiny baby and a poorly small child who never crawled or walked, she quite literally, never left my arms, but after her death she was kept in a hospital morgue, at an undertakers, inside a ‘faux-walnut box’. Yet I saw her as still existing in some way. For that long drive to Suffolk, I had her back with me, until she touched the sea. It was only then I began to understand she was gone.
Mothers’ Day was always a bit of a fluster when I was growing up. Not because my mum demanded roses and breakfast in bed – she was always too much of a rebel/hippy/feminist for that -- but because it was always touch and go as to whether my grandma’s cards would arrive before Sunday. I say ‘cards’ because Nan also liked to get one from us, preferably saying ‘to the world’s best Nan on Mothers’ Day’. Our inevitably late, hand-drawn affairs, or tasteful art cards ‘blank inside’, were a poor cousin to the pre-written poetry embossed in gold that arrived on the Thursday from my aunty. Now, since my grandma passed away age 91, Mum is surprisingly keen for us to mark the occasion, and I pause, wistfully, at the ‘grandmothers’-day’ cards in Smith’s.
I never dreamed that I might not be a mother and in fact what I really aspired to was becoming a grandmother. I would be the wise matriarch presiding over generations of chicks. When I lost my only son Otto in a full-term stillbirth in 2009, everything I’d taken for granted about motherhood up to that point evaporated. This sense of maternal loss was compounded by the fact that my mother-in-law died from a sudden and voracious brain tumour when I was six months pregnant. Almost overnight the illusion that having and becoming a mother were things we could take for granted lay by the wayside.
An Aviary of Small Birds is the book I wrote in response to these life-changing events, and particularly the loss of my son. It was a way for me to process the experience and because the stillbirth occurred at a crucial time in my career, where I was focusing on a first collection, it also prompted a new poetic. Whereas previously I had sometimes used form as a foil to avoid facing uncomfortable emotions, it was now a tool I could employ to help access and transform the most profound pain. And as I see it, if the work is to transcend catharsis and become art, then that transformation must take place. Equally, if it is to be poetry then what is felt (not just what is thought) needs to be tangible.
Writing Aviaryalso inspired a new understanding of family and what it means to be a mother. At the time I was part of the Complete Works mentoring programme that exists to widen cultural diversity in poetry publishing. I will always be grateful for the sense of extended familial support that came from being part of that community.
In the book itself, the natural world is a persistent backdrop to many of the poems. I realise now that that connection with birds, trees, the sea, rivers, the moon was a way of me holding on to what remained certain at a time when that which was human was anything but secure. Working in my garden, nurturing plants and flowers, was also a way for me to express a maternal instinct.
Currently, I’m a doctoral candidate at Royal Holloway, researching new ways of writing about nature in the face of climate change. An Aviary of Small Birds is a book that seeks to make sense of a very intimate loss and make the experience of grief universally accessible to others; my new work seeks to process a very universal loss – ecological devastation on a global scale – and somehow render it personal. If we are to survive as a species then we need to extend the care we offer to our own offspring to a wider community that includes all the life forms on Earth, so many of which are now perilously under threat. That, for me, is being a mother.
The Carcanet Blog SaleWith every blogpost we offer 25% off a Carcanet title, or titles by a particular author or group of authors.
For the next two weeks, we're giving you 25% off Rebecca Goss' Her Birth and Karen McCarthy Woolf's An Aviary of Small Birds.
All books come with 10% off and and free delivery at www.carcanet.co.uk so to claim your extra discount, use the code BLOG (case-sensitive). Happy reading!