Poems for Mothers' Day

One of the most intense and rewarding projects I have ever worked on was Night Feeds and Morning Songs, a collection of poems about motherhood. This was not only because of the emotive subject matter, but also because, immediately after Mother’s Day 2020 and shortly before I began editing the anthology, the nation locked down. We retreated into our houses and for many of us – although we didn’t know it at the time – the longest period of separation from our mums we would ever know was beginning.

It was far from an easy year to be a parent, enduring the sticky chaos of home-schooling or the isolation of the newborn days without a support network, but it was an agonising time to be a grown-up child, too, wracked with fears for our parents. (And, in lighter but occasionally genuinely fraught moments, trying to help them navigate Zoom.)

I edited Night Feeds and Morning Songs, a collection of poems about motherhood, while locked down with my young children and unable to see my own mother. I have to admit that I cried a lot. (Also: shouting, wine, half-hearted attempts at Joe Wicks workouts, wearing the same tracksuit bottoms for weeks, despairing of going to the loo alone ever again, forgetting what a hairbrush was, more crying.) These poems took me from pregnancy to the empty nest and to every mad milestone between, and it felt a particularly poignant time on every level to be thinking about this wild, deep bond, and about how it evolves over the years.

 Now the paperback is about to be published, and — thank goodness — life feels back on an even keel. We can say in person how grateful we are for each other. I am a better mother by far for not being so crushed up against full-time motherhood. Being teacher, family and friend to my daughters (not to mention chef, housemaid, cheerleader, encyclopaedia, referee…) was an impossible task. But this collection is a beautiful thing that came out of a difficult time, and the poems still move me so much. Here are a handful of my favourites.

Great-grandmother, by Jean Valentine  

Great-grandmother,

be with us

as if in the one same day & night

we all gave birth

in the one same safe-house, warm,

and then we rest together,

sleep, and nurse,

dreamily talk to our babies, warm,

in a safe room             all of us

carried in the close black sky.

I love the peace within this poem, and the sense that as mothers we are part of a long line of women who walked this way before us, feeding, soothing and loving.

The Evening Star by Sappho  

Hesperus, you bring everything that

                                     the light-tinged dawn has scattered;

you bring the sheep, you bring the goat, you bring

                                    the child back to its mother.

Sappho’s poems survive only in scraps and tatters but those fragments are enough to show us why she was so feted in the ancient world that Plato called her ‘the Tenth Muse’. I find these beautiful lines so deeply soothing, with their nursery rhyme cadences and the idea of rounding up the animals and bringing everyone safely home.

The Temple of the Wood Lavender by Lady Caroline Blanche Elizabeth Lindsay

A perfum’d sprig of lavender

You gave, dear child, to me;

It grew, you said, by the red rose bed,

And under the jessamine tree.

’Twas sweet, ay, sweet from many things;

But (sweeter than all) with scent

Of long past years and laughter and tears

It to me was redolent.

Our mothers are the repository of memories for the years we can no longer recall. We don’t remember learning to clap our chubby hands, or grabbing for the candle on our first birthday cake… but she does. It’s hard for a mother not to mourn her children’s infancy – though we might not miss the sleepless nights, we grieve for the squeezable thighs, the tiny froggy legs and the months when we were asked if we ‘merembered’ something. This short poem beautifully expresses a mother’s nostalgia for that strangely one-sided intimacy, built at first from months and years that only one of you remembers, though they colour everything after it with love.

Limbs by Mary Walker  

Afraid of the dark, they find their way

to my bed at night; one hot, one cold

and no rest for any of us.

Sleepless elbows and knees find my hip,

shin, and the tender bone under my eye,

my body remembering a knot of child

kneading my bladder, stealing my breath,

stamping footprints on my belly.

These growing limbs –

needing new shoes, longer pants, another haircut;

these limbs that cling to me like vines to the face of a house –

they are working themselves free.

Against the curtain of their still small breaths,

truth dawns – these limbs will outlast me.

Worse, first

they will stop walking themselves

to my bedside at night.

Personally, I’m a demon if I’m woken. Having weathered the extreme exhaustion of the baby years, I genuinely don’t feel nostalgic for the months I slept only for the odd hour, dropping like a stone out of consciousness until the next howl. Despite that, this lovely poem ambushed me completely when I discovered it – especially the beautifully paced power of this line: “they are working themselves free.”

Mother and Daughter Sonnets XVI by Augusta Webster 

She will not have it that my days wanes low,

Poor of the fire its drooping sun denies,

That on my brow the thin lines write good-byes

Which soon may be read plain for all the know,

Telling that I have done with youth’s brave show;

Alas! and done with youth in heart and eyes,

With wonder and far expectancies,

Save but to say ‘I knew such long ago.’

She will not have it. Loverlike to me,

She with her happy gaze finds all that’s best,

She sees this fair and that unfretted still,

And her own sunshine over all the rest:

So she half keeps me as she’d have me be,

And I forget to age, through her sweet will.

Victorian poet Augusta Webster expresses so gorgeously here that your mum is always your mum, no matter how many years pass, what they bring or how many miles are between you. I hope the last Mothers’ Day we’ll be apart is behind us.

Night Feeds and Morning Songs, edited by Ana Sampson, is published by Trapeze.

The Poetry Exhange

I first became aware of The Poetry Exchange after meeting John Prebble at the 2019 Chiddingstone Literary Festival. It was a wonderful day full of treats: a fantastically lively event, a surprise appearance from one of my former English teachers and Joanne Harris making friends with my mum in the Green Room, making her the envy of her book club. Meeting John and learning about The Poetry Exchange was another gift. I so hope we can have those experiences again soon.

The Poetry Exchange invite people to talk about a poem that has been a friend to them. They have an excellent podcast - I’ve recently enjoyed interviews with actor Brian Cox and about Dylan Thomas’ ‘Fern Hill’ - but they also give people the chance to explore their relationship with a poem in depth, with the Exchange’s poetry gurus. I was beyond thrilled to be asked to participate, and the poem that first sprung to mind was Liz Berry’s sensational ‘The Republic of Motherhood’ - which you can read in full here - so I asked to bring that to the discussion.

I read a LOT of poetry. I’m currently completing edits on my eleventh anthology, and I must have read many thousands of poems over the past decade, many of which have become cherished talismans. But to have the opportunity to dive deep into a poem I love, to pore over what it meant to me for an hour or so, was a novel luxury and a completely wonderful experience. It felt medicinal. I recalled the first time I met ‘The Republic of Motherhood’, stumbling across it online when my youngest daughter was one and we were still in the grip of baby madness. I was electrified. I had never seen a poem that spoke like this or about this.

The image of the totalitarian state of motherhood - the uniform, the ritual, the red book bureaucracy, the prescribed choruses - is perfect.

‘As required, I stood beneath the flag of Motherhood
and opened my mouth although I did not know the anthem.’

I know Liz is saying something deep and true about the expectations placed on mothers not to deviate from the sanctioned hymn sheet of baby-wrangling bliss, but she also managed to remind me of my bafflement at parachuting into this strange territory without having learned the language. Where did the five little ducks go swimming one day? How did everyone else know when to Zoom Zoom Zoom their nonplussed babies? What actually was weaning, or mastitis, or cluster feeding?

Liz captured so vividly how the neighbourhood through which I had previously hustled in heels to work was transfigured by crossing that border, the mundane made strange. I was now one of the daytime denizens, bundled in puked-on cardigans ‘soft as a creature’ against the cold, blearily pounding the pavements. My suddenly small world was landmarked by draughty church halls, weighing clinics, libraries offering Rhyme Time and coffee shops with enough space between the tables for me to bump and shamble my buggy through. On the outskirts of one of the world’s most exciting cities, I pottered between municipal amenities in an exhausted daze.

I had been so avowedly urban, such an indoors cat, that I hadn’t owned a waterproof coat until I had my first baby. I always figured that if it rained I would use an umbrella (impossible to hold while pushing a pram) or just, I breezily told my husband, “go in a shop.” With a baby who was frequently incensed in company but tranquil when I pushed her for miles, I became an outdoor creature. When Liz writes of pushing her pram through freeze and blossom and, later, daffodils, I was reminded - by the sensitively incisive questions from John and Andrea - how that year plugged me back into the seasons’ rhythms for the first time since my own childhood. I don’t think it was just that I spent so many hours tramping the Common, although my daughter’s urban world was bounded by duck ponds and dandelion clocks, snowdrops and squirrels. There’s something about parenthood that links us to the turning world again: a growing baby is a yardstick against which to measure the years.

What Andrea and John helped me to understand was something I already knew on an intellectual level: that we bring our own emotions and memories to every piece of art we encounter. When speaking about poetry, I often point out that nobody expects two people to listen to the same record and have the same response - there might be a sticky-floored nightclub in my mind’s eye and a sun-soaked beach in yours - but school has left most of us with the idea that there’s only one way to understand a poem. Discussing the poem in such detail made realise just how deeply, vividly personal my response to Liz Berry’s Republic had been. It looks like Tooting to me, but everyone who reads it will map their own psychic geography onto the poem, and it will belong to them.

Liz also talks about the physical toll of childbearing, in a way I hadn’t previously seen literature of any kind do: the fistfuls of moulting hair, the aching, exhausted ‘spindled bones’. If you’re lucky, a first pregnancy can be a deliciously cosseted time: take my seat! Don’t lift that! Build yourself up with nourishing meals! The poem brilliantly evokes the shock of being plunged into an unfamiliar, manual job with round-the-clock demands - the tender drudgery of ‘Feedingcleaninglovingfeeding’ - while feeling like you’ve been run over. There never seemed to be time to get going on that vegetable garden I had so naively planned for my maternity leave. There was barely time to prepare any food for myself that required more than one hand. By four months in, I was about 95% biscuit. I have a shoulder and a bladder that will never be the same again, and Liz told me I wasn’t alone.

The image of the doctors in the poem - ‘slender and efficient’ - is quietly devastating in opposition to how the new mother feels. And the three of us talked for some time about the searing phrase ‘its unbearable skinless beauty’. There’s a poem called ‘Vixen’ by Glenda Beagan, also in Night Feeds and Morning Songs, which opens with the line: ‘motherhood peels me bare’. With John and Andrea, I probed these phrases. Why had they struck me so emphatically? There was much to unpack about the vulnerability I had felt in early motherhood, poised to panic when my baby erupted and, later on, the heartache of your children’s fragility when they are out in the world, out of your arms, blithely oblivious to your agony that they could be scalded or trampled or sneered at by the world.

It feels, to me, as though ‘The Republic of Motherhood’ builds to a climax that is a shout of sisterhood. Fervently, devoutly, the narrator asserts her citizenship of this wild queendom and her solidarity with its denizens - especially the traumatised, especially the haunted. The poem underlined the sense I had all through editing Night Feeds and Morning Songs of these verses forming a literary community during a locked-down time when we couldn’t access a physical one. Poetry of all kinds has been important to me this past year, and I don’t think I’m the only one. It can be gobbled even when time is short or attention is scattered to feed us by reminding us of our fellow travellers and our shared feelings.

Talking to John and Andrea about this poem felt intimate, emotional and deeply therapeutic. I discovered new personal reference points in a poem I love and savoured each beautifully constructed line and striking image with new relish. The sheer indulgent pleasure of being asked to examine the chords it struck in my memories and mind shouldn’t have been a surprise for someone who has been working with poetry for over a decade, but somehow it was.

There are now many people, publications and organisations who bang the drum for poetry’s mental health benefits: William Sieghart, whom I was lucky enough to interview about his Poetry Pharmacy books and Deborah Alma who edited The Emergency Poet anthology and runs the Poetry Pharmacy in Shropshire among them. I’ve often written on the subject myself for publications including The Daily Express and Red Online. But being given time and permission to spend this long with a poem that has been a friend to me was an extraordinary and unexpected gift that gave me a deeper understanding of how poetry works on us as well as a greater love for this poem in particular. I resolve to make time to sit with a poem in this way more often, to suck out its marrow and let it work its magic on me. The Poetry Exchange is a wonderful thing and I’m so grateful to have encountered it.

You can find out more about The Poetry Exchange here and listen to their award-winning podcasts here.

You can buy Liz Berry’s wonderful pamphlet The Republic of Motherhood here or from your local bookshop.

Night Feeds and Morning Songs, an anthology of poems about motherhood, can be bought here or from your local bookshop.

Please note this blog post includes affiliate links to Bookshop.org, which supports independent bookshops, and if you buy through them I earn a small commission (at no extra cost to you.)

Book Review: After the Storm, by Emma Jane Unsworth

I was sent an early proof for this honest and brilliantly written memoir. I came to it with no expectation, really. I haven’t read Emma’s novels - Animals and Adults - though I’ll certainly seek them out now. Also, I didn’t suffer from Post-Natal Depression. Oddly, I didn’t even experience the dreaded ‘third day blues’ on which, I was warned by other women and our NCT teacher, our milk would flood in and we’d cry all day. I suspect that this was partly because I simply didn’t have the energy to process anything at the time.

I had what I now consider to be an averagely traumatic first birth. There was a worry about my daughter’s heartbeat and after some toing and froing I was given an emergency c-section during which I lost two and a half litres of blood. Almost half of it, apparently. I’m forever grateful to the serene and efficient theatre team and the fact that my spinal anaesthetic meant I couldn’t see the gory floor. The loss wasn’t quite enough to need a transfusion - though I was dimly aware through my opiate high of someone ‘getting the blood guy on the phone’ - but more than enough to leave me wraith-like for some time afterwards. Often, when I first woke, I couldn’t move my legs. A day or so in, after a fierce battle to swim up from unconsciousness, I was so weak I convinced myself I was dying and calmly instructed my husband to call an ambulance because someone would need to feed the baby. Fortunately, it turned out I just needed to be fortified with some apple juice and a piece of toast, but those early days weren’t a breeze.

Despite escaping PND, though, so much of this extraordinary book rang true with me. The subtitle is Post-Natal Depression and the Utter Weirdness of New Motherhood, and I don’t think there’s any mother who won’t relate to at least some of what Emma so eloquently articulates. She vividly recalled to me how my daughter’s screaming induced pure animal panic in me, how once it started - and there were months during which it seemed it barely paused - I could think of nothing but stopping it. I remembered the well-meaning people who kindly reassured me they didn’t mind the anguished howling while I strained out a smile, inwardly screaming, “I MIND! SHE BLOODY MINDS! JUST LISTEN TO HER!” Every moment my baby was quiet I felt equal to the alien new blue-collar job of motherhood. And every moment she was screaming - so many moments, they smeared into weeks - I knew that what was being asked of me all day, every day, half the night, every night was impossible.

Photo credit Alex Lake / TWO SHORT DAYS

The section where Emma tries to join friends for afternoon tea and the civilised world literally does not fit her anymore will stay with me forever. I vividly remember those occasions: bumping a laden buggy through squeezed-together tables, muttering apologies, praying for the nap to continue, with my seeping, sweating, unfamiliar new body squeezed into weird new clothes with extra holes in. The divorce between my work, my life, my mind and what I had previously considered my self was jarring. It felt permanent, although it proved not to be. I had been prepared on some level for the fug of exhaustion and the vomit-spiked hair, but not to feel incapable of finishing a sentence even in my head.

Emma writes with humour as well as with brilliant clarity. (I, too, resented the shrill and jumped-up Upsy Daisy for having her own bed on wheels to trundle around the Night Garden.) And she expresses things here that I have rarely seen written down about disappointment, boredom, shame and rage. I’ve read and written a lot since editing Night Feeds and Morning Songs about mothers’ stories being routinely undervalued and dismissed, and about the difficulties mothers face in carving out time for their own careers and creativity. This piercing, fierce, raw and beautiful book will help go some way towards redressing that balance. It will change and perhaps even save lives.

I actually hadn’t expected to enjoy the newborn days as much as I did - I figured they’d be brutal and boring, and those low expectations were my friends whenever they were just that. But we are bombarded by images of ecstatic, subtly but impeccably groomed women, suffused with love, enjoying tranquil moments of deep connection with their beaming infants in beautifully appointed, airy, pastel-hued rooms. It’s easy to believe that hype, and the jarring shock when reality falls short - as it must do - is so, so damaging to women. It feels like ingratitude, weakness or self-indulgence to confess that we’re struggling. The scorching guilt of admitting that the deeply desired state of motherhood sometimes makes us feel stifled or furious or despairing prevents so many women from accessing the help and support they need.

There has been a change, I think, in the way we talk about these things. The excellent essay collection The Best Most Awful Job, edited by Katherine May, struck a chord with many women with its truthful takes on the madness of child-wrangling, and I especially loved Saima Mir’s essay on maternal rage. This recent advertising campaign for Portal - showing a woman struggling with breastfeeding - had me in tears and time-travelling back to my daughter’s earliest days with its accuracy.

And After the Storm - this truthful, visceral, dazzlingly well-written memoir in which Emma shares her experiences of vulnerability, fury and desperation - experiences that I believe will resonate with many mothers - is an essential contribution to this discussion. I cannot thank her enough for writing it.

After the Storm: Postnatal Depression and the Utter Weirdness of New Motherhood by Emma Jane Unsworth is published by Profile Books.

Night Feeds and Morning Songs: Honest, Fierce and Beautiful Poems about Motherhood, edited by Ana Sampson, is published by Trapeze.

Please note this blog post includes affiliate links to Bookshop.org, which supports independent bookshops, and if you buy through them I earn a small commission (at no extra cost to you.)