Poetry review – DAUGHTER OF THE SUN: Alex Josephy reviews Rachel Spence’s imaginative exploration of a mother-daughter relationship
Daughter of the Sun
Rachel Spence
Emma Press
ISBN 9781915628343
£10.99
Reading Daughter of the Sun has sent me back to 2020, when I first reviewed Call and Response, the pamphlet that forms the basis for the first half of this collection. I was thrilled then by Rachel Spence’s skillful use of sonnet form to trace, with moving and delicate honesty, the phases of her mother’s illness, their reconciliation, and the deepening of an often stormy relationship. As I wrote then, the drama is in the small bruises, truces and intimate moments along the way. While this is still the case, returning to the poems has been a delight, not just in the new material included here but across the whole collection.
The original three section sequence, “Call and Response”, has been extended into four ‘acts’, its imagery and emotional curve intact. Tragically, time has moved on and the poems now encompass the mother’s illness, a brief reprieve, and then her death and the slow evolution of the daughter’s grief. In “Medea’s Song” which forms the second half of the book, Spence illuminates a dark corner of Greek myth and theatrical tragedy, to reveal an alternative version of womanhood.
In “Call and Response”, Spence uses aspects of sonnet form (in particular its box-like structure) with enough constraint to allow her troubled emotions to push and expand against it. Acknowledging the influence of contemporary poets such as Mimi Khalvati, she herself has said: ‘The more emotional you feel, the more form becomes your friend as a poet.’ As in other notable sonnet sequences, the underlying themes are of love and time, and how our understanding of mortality brings these into perspective.
The swirl of emotions that exists between mother and daughter, from irritation and claustrophobia to empathy and unquestioning love, is sparklingly alive in these poems. Spence recalls:
…those days when the two of us together in a room
meant one of us was struggling to breathe.
At another moment (after a car breakdown) she honours her mother’s strong, embodied determination to make the best of it by waiting for the AA in a ‘posh restaurant up the hill’:
…your dancer’s calves powering up the slope,
shoulder blades jutting through damp silk,
the way your hips spelled smile.
There’s an element of ‘tough love’ when the mother refuses to offer much sympathy after the daughter’s lover abandons her, brushing the problem aside: ‘Don’t come to me. Fight your own battles.’ This harsh treatment is linked to their shared Jewish ancestry; the mother is:
…tough as the ash trees fighting
their way through frost-bitten Polish soil.
But Spence finds sly humour there too; in fact, the mother’s atheism is ‘deep as tubas’, and returning to a poem early in the collection, I still find it hilarious that her Jewish grandmothers, in order to keep up appearances,
…counted grapefruit spoons, possessed
small dishes shaped like avocados.
Spence employs the language of love to great effect, sometimes juxtaposing thoughts about her own love life with those about her mother and at other times using the language of an affaire in relation to the bumpy progress of their connection. After a falling-out: ‘….Darling, how’s your boiler?/ And once again, we’re on.’
The turning point, where the mother starts to become more dependent on her daughter, is movingly understated in a phone call where:’…your voice is different./ Old-lady fear fluttering like a baby bird’s.’
In the time remaining, the poems trace the healing of a strained relationship as intense as a fractured marriage. By the time the cancer goes into remission, Spence is proud to admit to ways in which she resembles her mother, and wants to respond to her as a role model:
I know I’ve inherited half your genes.
I drink my body weight in tea. Feel naked
without lipstick. But what of your stoic heart?
Your gift for loving men? That blowtorch smile?
As the story moves on, time is foregrounded in various ways. At first it is by prefacing poems with months and years, while in the later “Acts” Spence invents new terms for passages of time. At first, these can be interpreted through connotation: ‘ledge days’, ‘hinge week’, ‘gnomon days’, etc. In the final act, the words for time are linked to the consolation she finds in rivers and swimming. I learned some beautiful new words here, for instance ‘Pirr days’ (a word for a light breath of wind that makes a cat’s paw on the water).
The effect of these different ways of accounting for time is to suggest an unravelling, and also a loosening of anxiety, a kind of liberation. Spence describes the family in her mother’s final days as ‘unlatched from time’, released into an anarchic state:
…we danced like spiritelli
carved by Donatello for a baptismal font
gleefully micturating, celebrating new life
in spindrifts, jets and pinwheels, spouting
defiance…
But this is a collection of two parts. The second sequence, “Medea’s Song”, comes at mothers and daughters from a different angle. Where “Call and Response” is grounded in specific, contemporary culture and detail – Jewish heredity, laptops, skinny lattes, carcinogenic doughnuts, chemo – Medea ushers us into a reworked version of ancient Greek myth and includes witches, gods, spindles and stars. Then, in an acrobatic twist, these are joined by telescopes, ‘quantum swiftness’, time bends, the Big Bang; the vocabulary of scientific discovery.
The form too flies off in another direction. Skeins of words and beautifully suggestive imagery make patterns across the page, leaving plenty of white space. Some pages resolve into shape poems, such as the one where Medea’s lover Jason is compared to an archer, ‘pulling her towards him’.
The sea imagery persists, bridging the two halves; Medea, granddaughter of Helios the sun god, is the daughter of a sea nymph. Sun and sea images are threaded through Medea’s poem.
In Euripides’ play, Medea, married to the Argonaut Jason, vengefully kills her own sons as well as Jason’s new wife. This sequence virtually ignores that part of Medea’s story:
She will land on the other side of outrage
beyond murder, sacrifice
way beyond revenge
In this new telling, she is transgressive in another way, recast as a woman taught to understand and practise science, not interested in child-rearing, turning away from the roles of daughter and mother: ‘Her mother’s absent, barely worth a line.’ She is a woman ‘unmapped… unread, unnumbered’ but also freed by a scientific education. Sent to Hecate to be trained as a witch, that role does not interest her either. Instead, in a similar way to the poet as she imagines herself at the end of “Call and Response”, Medea slips free from linear time to join an ethereal community of scientific thinkers:
Others have come before her and others will follow
…Do not call them seers of sisters
They are the owls of history
…They’ll teach us to see in the dark
I enjoyed this collection more with each re-reading. In both sequences Spence creates magical effects, while never straying from emotional truth. She has returned to the original mother and daughter poems to write with new perception from the depth of ‘grief’s helical currents’, finding herself closer than ever to her mother. Moreover she has taken a dive into Greek myth to bring a reviled model of womanhood out into the light.
Mar 15 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Rachel Spence
Poetry review – DAUGHTER OF THE SUN: Alex Josephy reviews Rachel Spence’s imaginative exploration of a mother-daughter relationship
Reading Daughter of the Sun has sent me back to 2020, when I first reviewed Call and Response, the pamphlet that forms the basis for the first half of this collection. I was thrilled then by Rachel Spence’s skillful use of sonnet form to trace, with moving and delicate honesty, the phases of her mother’s illness, their reconciliation, and the deepening of an often stormy relationship. As I wrote then, the drama is in the small bruises, truces and intimate moments along the way. While this is still the case, returning to the poems has been a delight, not just in the new material included here but across the whole collection.
The original three section sequence, “Call and Response”, has been extended into four ‘acts’, its imagery and emotional curve intact. Tragically, time has moved on and the poems now encompass the mother’s illness, a brief reprieve, and then her death and the slow evolution of the daughter’s grief. In “Medea’s Song” which forms the second half of the book, Spence illuminates a dark corner of Greek myth and theatrical tragedy, to reveal an alternative version of womanhood.
In “Call and Response”, Spence uses aspects of sonnet form (in particular its box-like structure) with enough constraint to allow her troubled emotions to push and expand against it. Acknowledging the influence of contemporary poets such as Mimi Khalvati, she herself has said: ‘The more emotional you feel, the more form becomes your friend as a poet.’ As in other notable sonnet sequences, the underlying themes are of love and time, and how our understanding of mortality brings these into perspective.
The swirl of emotions that exists between mother and daughter, from irritation and claustrophobia to empathy and unquestioning love, is sparklingly alive in these poems. Spence recalls:
At another moment (after a car breakdown) she honours her mother’s strong, embodied determination to make the best of it by waiting for the AA in a ‘posh restaurant up the hill’:
There’s an element of ‘tough love’ when the mother refuses to offer much sympathy after the daughter’s lover abandons her, brushing the problem aside: ‘Don’t come to me. Fight your own battles.’ This harsh treatment is linked to their shared Jewish ancestry; the mother is:
But Spence finds sly humour there too; in fact, the mother’s atheism is ‘deep as tubas’, and returning to a poem early in the collection, I still find it hilarious that her Jewish grandmothers, in order to keep up appearances,
Spence employs the language of love to great effect, sometimes juxtaposing thoughts about her own love life with those about her mother and at other times using the language of an affaire in relation to the bumpy progress of their connection. After a falling-out: ‘….Darling, how’s your boiler?/ And once again, we’re on.’
The turning point, where the mother starts to become more dependent on her daughter, is movingly understated in a phone call where:’…your voice is different./ Old-lady fear fluttering like a baby bird’s.’
In the time remaining, the poems trace the healing of a strained relationship as intense as a fractured marriage. By the time the cancer goes into remission, Spence is proud to admit to ways in which she resembles her mother, and wants to respond to her as a role model:
As the story moves on, time is foregrounded in various ways. At first it is by prefacing poems with months and years, while in the later “Acts” Spence invents new terms for passages of time. At first, these can be interpreted through connotation: ‘ledge days’, ‘hinge week’, ‘gnomon days’, etc. In the final act, the words for time are linked to the consolation she finds in rivers and swimming. I learned some beautiful new words here, for instance ‘Pirr days’ (a word for a light breath of wind that makes a cat’s paw on the water).
The effect of these different ways of accounting for time is to suggest an unravelling, and also a loosening of anxiety, a kind of liberation. Spence describes the family in her mother’s final days as ‘unlatched from time’, released into an anarchic state:
But this is a collection of two parts. The second sequence, “Medea’s Song”, comes at mothers and daughters from a different angle. Where “Call and Response” is grounded in specific, contemporary culture and detail – Jewish heredity, laptops, skinny lattes, carcinogenic doughnuts, chemo – Medea ushers us into a reworked version of ancient Greek myth and includes witches, gods, spindles and stars. Then, in an acrobatic twist, these are joined by telescopes, ‘quantum swiftness’, time bends, the Big Bang; the vocabulary of scientific discovery.
The form too flies off in another direction. Skeins of words and beautifully suggestive imagery make patterns across the page, leaving plenty of white space. Some pages resolve into shape poems, such as the one where Medea’s lover Jason is compared to an archer, ‘pulling her towards him’.
The sea imagery persists, bridging the two halves; Medea, granddaughter of Helios the sun god, is the daughter of a sea nymph. Sun and sea images are threaded through Medea’s poem.
In Euripides’ play, Medea, married to the Argonaut Jason, vengefully kills her own sons as well as Jason’s new wife. This sequence virtually ignores that part of Medea’s story:
In this new telling, she is transgressive in another way, recast as a woman taught to understand and practise science, not interested in child-rearing, turning away from the roles of daughter and mother: ‘Her mother’s absent, barely worth a line.’ She is a woman ‘unmapped… unread, unnumbered’ but also freed by a scientific education. Sent to Hecate to be trained as a witch, that role does not interest her either. Instead, in a similar way to the poet as she imagines herself at the end of “Call and Response”, Medea slips free from linear time to join an ethereal community of scientific thinkers:
I enjoyed this collection more with each re-reading. In both sequences Spence creates magical effects, while never straying from emotional truth. She has returned to the original mother and daughter poems to write with new perception from the depth of ‘grief’s helical currents’, finding herself closer than ever to her mother. Moreover she has taken a dive into Greek myth to bring a reviled model of womanhood out into the light.