'This seems to me a celebration of poetry as a tool for mapping our lives in all their joy and difficulty and a space for recognition and shared understanding' - Poetry Wales Spring 2001.
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I co-edited with Dilys Wood this anthology
of poems by 114 women writers about their mothers, fathers or both parents.
Many of the poems explore complex ambivalent relationships. Some celebrate
good relationships, others depict very damaging ones. The poems also look
at parents' lives, attitudes, their relationships with one another, their
ageing and a number are about feelings after they have died. The book has
a preface by U.A. Fanthorpe. 'This seems to me a celebration of poetry as a tool for mapping our lives in all their joy and difficulty and a space for recognition and shared understanding' - Poetry Wales Spring 2001. |
| Enitharmon 2000 Enitharmon Press Price £8.95 Available from bookshops |
| Contributors |
The contributors live in Britain though some of them were born in
other countries. Several of them - such as |
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| Themes | There are moving poems by refugees whose parents were taken away by the Nazis, about a father who fought in the Spanish Civil War and about parents who were imprisoned during Stalin's purges. Others relate extraordinary events in their parents' early lives. One or two use fairy tale to depict destructive relationships. There is a phone call to a stepmothers, a dialogue with a father after his death, a description of bathing a dependent mother, a search for a birth mother. The poems are in a variety of styles and tones: tender, angry, questioning, meditative, conversational, humorous. | ||||
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