I wrote this review for a commission that ended up not happening... so I'll share it here instead!
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I type this on the sofa, reaching around the pre-schooler who has decided this is the opportune moment to climb onto my lap for a cuddle, while CBeebies distracts them away from the temptation of the laptop. Which makes me, perhaps, the ideal reader for Liz Berry’s 2018 pamphlet The Republic of Motherhood. The title poem reads as a manifesto for the ‘wild queendom’ of Motherhood (‘The Republic of Motherhood’), and elsewhere Berry describes the experience that many mothers can relate to, ‘of being born again / as you were born’ (‘Early’).
Berry has commented that she had ‘wanted to make poems that [she’d] needed to read’ when struggling with new motherhood, and she certainly seems to have achieved that in this pamphlet.[1]Throughout the poems runs a thread of solidarity with other mothers: ‘I stood with my sisters in the queues of Motherhood’ (‘The Republic of Motherhood’); ‘Sweet ghosts […] Who are lonely / though never alone’ (‘So Tenderly It Wounds Them’); ‘women in darkness, / women with babies’ (The Spiritualist Church’). Also running through the collection is a raw, at times brutal, honesty about the struggles of new motherhood. The speaker of ‘The Yellow Curtains’ admits, ‘I cry at nothing and cry most of the time’, while in the description of labour in ‘The Spiritualist Church’ the speaker is ‘certain he was dying, that I was letting him / die and they were cutting me open’. ‘Marie’ contains the moving stanza, ‘you could see I was drowning / and taking him with me, / my boy, my baby’.
Berry has admitted that she was unsure about publishing the title poem, ‘I was afraid that everyone would tell me I was a terrible mother or that one day my sons might grow up and read the poem and think I didn’t love them’.[2] Despite these fears, there is an underpinning current of love, together with a sense of wonder at the experience of motherhood that act as counterpoints to the darker moments. ‘The Republic of Motherhood’ ends with a prayer for the ‘queendom, / its sorrow, its unbearable skinless beauty’, and it is this wild beauty that recurs throughout the subsequent poems. ‘Connemara’ ends with the celebratory lines ‘[i]nside me you pulsed / single celled, / extraordinary’, while the following poem speaks tenderly to a ‘[l]ittle horse heart, foal’ offering to ‘let my love be your paddock, your bridle, / your trough’ (‘Horse Heart’). The speaker finds hope in her child: ‘your small body would be the one to carry us’ (‘Sky Birth’), and the joy of motherhood is often inseparable from its pain, as in the final line of ‘So Tenderly It Wounds Them’, ‘I never knew it would be like this but God when he laughs…’ and in the ending of ‘Early’, ‘forgiving you for everything / your sweet love would thieve me of’.
Writing about motherhood, and indeed about any aspect of domestic life, has long been a point of contention for women poets. There can be unease on the poet’s part about laying bare their honest experiences for their children to read and be read about by a wider audience. Sharon Olds has commented that for her children, ‘[i]t was bad enough growing up with a poet in the house without me talking about them.’[3] Additionally, it has long been suggested that domestic themes are not welcome in mainstream publishing, where the agreed ‘universal’ themes tend to be ones that appeal to more traditionally masculine tastes: war, sex and the male subject. Yet, as many writers have argued, motherhood and the domestic are as universal as more traditional themes, and Berry’s pamphlet is evidence of this.
Berry’s poems are accessible to any reader, revealing the reality of motherhood in an expansive and welcoming manner. The final poem, ‘The Steps’ begins with an intimate address, ‘this is where it begins, love – / you and I’, as the soon-to-be-parents set off together towards their child’s birth. Paradoxically, this intensely personal poem also reads as an invitation to the reader as they approach the poetry of motherhood. The use of the second person draws the reader into the heart of the experience. Berry does something similar when she uses Black Country dialect words, and then provides a glossary for the reader. The poems ‘Bobowler’ and ‘Lullaby’ make the most explicit use of dialect, but Berry’s distinctive use of language continues throughout the collection. The glossary makes the poetry inclusive by giving the reader access to Berry’s poetics. Her honesty and openness encourage the reader to feel affection and perhaps kinship with the speakers and subjects of her poems.
Despite the depths of the emotions that are explored in this pamphlet, the overriding experience of reading Berry’s poems is one of gentleness, of tender motherly love. The reader is left with a sense of belonging and an invitation to join the Republic of Motherhood.
[1] ‘In Conversation: Liz Berry and Mona Arshi’, Granta, 13 May 2019, https://granta.com/liz-berry-and-mona-arshi-in-conversation/. [2] ‘In Conversation’, Granta. [3] Interview, ‘Sharon Olds: Confessions of a divorce’, Sabine Durrant, The Guardian, 26 Jan 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jan/26/sharon-olds-american-poet-divorce.
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