Motherhood, Language and the every day during the poetry of Astrid Lorange, Amy Brown and L.K Holt
Cordite Poetry Review
2020
For a long time after my daughter was born, I looked for representations of motherhood everywhere. I looked for it in casual interactions with other mothers in the park and on the street, I looked for it with friends, in mothers’ groups and on the screen. I looked for it in my memories of mothers (including my own), and I looked for it in books. In the first six-weeks or so after my daughter was born I tore through Elisa Albert’s After Birth and Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work. I remember them like balm, even though I cannot remember much of the content of either book now. I read and re-read Maya Angelou, Marguerite Duras, Julia Kristeva, Maggie Nelson and Adrienne Rich all of whom I had read before but reading them as a mother felt different. I read Elena Ferrante for the first time and was in awe at the way she wrote about mothers. I read Deborah Levy’s fiction and nonfiction and thought her novel Hot Milk would have been more satisfying had it been a nonfiction account of the central mother-daughter relationship (reading into that novel Levy’s complicated relationship with her mother). I heard the poet Rachel Zucker interviewed about her book MOTHERs on a parenting podcast and when I bought that book, I tore through it too. Again, balm. I read Jacqueline Rose’s Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty and though aspects of the book annoyed me, I was grateful for it.
This year, I have been reading Astrid Lorange’s Labour and Other Poems, Amy Brown’s Neon Days and L K Holt’s Birth Plan all of which are oriented by the writer’s experience and observations of motherhood. I use the present perfect continuous ‘have been’ deliberately, because in many ways the reading of all three of these collections has been characterised by dipping in-and-out of, circling back, and re-reading.
Read the full essay here.