BY CANDACE FERTILE
After Birth
Elizabeth Ross
Palimpsest Press
Braille Rainbow
Mike Barnes
Biblioasis
★ What We Carry
Susan Glickman
Signal Editions
AS THE TITLE indicates, After Birth focuses on the complicated feelings a woman experiences both during and after childbirth, and it also comprises intergenerational concerns, such as a mother taking her children to visit her own aging parents. Ross has a facility for wonderful twists that capture the vagaries of real life with all its joys and disappointments. The first poem, “One in a Series,” describes the speaker’s feelings in extremely difficult labour. It sets the tone, and what a tone it is: “I wanted to shit the bed, / wanted the honesty of it, // not the pain chart’s smiley-to-sad face portraiture.”
Once the baby arrives, the pain and fear do not disappear. They simply shift focus into childrearing. Ross thrusts the reader into ordinary life and its bodily functions. In “Weaning,” for example, “Snot glows in your left nostril, / you wheeze, eyes red with tears.” Or in “Lice,” the mother cleans her daughter’s head after getting a note from the school: “I’m the best / mother, picking you clean, / but can’t bring myself to squish them.”
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About Quill & Quire
Poetry and process: A roundtable with Karen Solie, Doyali Islam, and Matthew Walsh; Bringing kids into the FOLD; Libraries take on the Big Five