Chris Beckett is both moved and enlightened as he reads this heart-rending collection by Rebecca Goss
Her Birth
Rebecca Goss
Carcanet/Northern House
ISBN 978-1847772381
70 pp £9.95
This Forward Prize nominated collection focuses on the tragically short life of a baby with a faulty heart. It is a truly heart-rending book about the strengths and weaknesses of the heart, both as bodily machine and also as the seat of love and grief. And it is not only the baby’s heart that is affected by its destructive anomaly. Her parents’ hearts (and those of the readers too) also experience a battering, though of course she is the one who pays the highest price.
Because the poems are quite spare and direct, uncomplicated in their diction and syntax, I read the book through in one go and was deeply affected by the narrative power of it, as well as by the wealth of powerful images. Despite feeling rather drained, I made myself a cup of tea and started straight back for a second read. It is that sort of book, one in which a difficult subject is tackled in ways which mean you cannot put it down.
One reason for this is how Goss continually surprises you. The anomaly which affects the baby’s heart seems to relish the destruction of its host, as it flourishes/ to defeat her in the stunning short opening poem of the book, ‘Fetal Heart’. Even the closing section, with its optimistic ‘Welcome’ to a new and healthy baby girl born after the death of her sister, is shot through with images of the heart-killed girl. But these do not come not simply in the form of memories: they are much more visceral than that. Take for example the poem ‘Shadows’:
Clasping your newborn ribs
I see her small bones
beneath your skin.
Your dead sister, visible
like x-ray, is glowing
through your pores.
Goss could have written as if her small bones glowed beneath your skin but she doesn’t. She writes I see her small bones; and even though I know it is phantom, I completely believe her and am horrified to see those small ghost bones. Extraordinary!
Another clue, I believe, to the hypnotic pull of this book is the consistency of its image bank, often to do with machinery and boats. The collection begins with an epigraph from Kate Clanchy’s marvellous Newborn:
Soon, you will make your way out
of this estuary country,
leave the low farms and fog banks…
But Goss’s baby is no sooner out in the sea of life than she is in trouble, drifting, and her death after just 16 months is described as an undocking (‘Severe Ebstein’s Anomaly’), which has the ironic effect of docking her parents (‘A Child Dies in Liverpool’):
Stilled by rain,
we find a bench, sit down where her death
has docked us.
There is something very strange going on in that word docked, a short undemonstrative sort of word, with ironic echoes of doctor and the safety of a dry dock, making it all the more poignant and painful as a result.
Another source of the book’s power, I believe, is to do with pronouns: it was only on second or third reading that I realised that the sick baby is always referred to as her, while each you in the book is either the poet’s husband or her new healthy daughter. Also, the baby is only named Ella on the back cover, never in the poems. Despite describing her doing things like sweating, smiling, panting, even sitting in her highchair grumpy as a gnome, it is as if Goss cannot bear to address Ella directly.
After all, I (and most readers of this book) do not know how it feels to have a child whose heart will not let her grow, who turns all your hopes and dreams to shipwreck. But in addition to the many surprising images, metaphors, haunting turns of phrase in this wonderful collection, I sense that this little quirk of the pronouns carries a huge freight of pain and loss. It does not imply an unwillingness to address the sick baby directly or any lack of empathy for her; but it is perhaps an acknowledgement that the sickness does turn her from a you to a her, to someone with whom the usual direct communication is ultimately (and cruelly) impossible. I find this, like so much else in Goss’s beautiful book, both enlightening and deeply moving.
.
Chris Beckett was born in London but grew up in Ethiopia in the 1960?s. His second collection, Ethiopia Boy, was published in 2013 by Carcanet/Oxford poets and was enthusiastically reviewed in Poetry Review and Poetry London. He also translates Ethiopian poetry into English. More info is on http://www.chrisbeckettpoems.com
Chris Beckett is both moved and enlightened as he reads this heart-rending collection by Rebecca Goss
Her Birth
Rebecca Goss
Carcanet/Northern House
ISBN 978-1847772381
70 pp £9.95
This Forward Prize nominated collection focuses on the tragically short life of a baby with a faulty heart. It is a truly heart-rending book about the strengths and weaknesses of the heart, both as bodily machine and also as the seat of love and grief. And it is not only the baby’s heart that is affected by its destructive anomaly. Her parents’ hearts (and those of the readers too) also experience a battering, though of course she is the one who pays the highest price.
Because the poems are quite spare and direct, uncomplicated in their diction and syntax, I read the book through in one go and was deeply affected by the narrative power of it, as well as by the wealth of powerful images. Despite feeling rather drained, I made myself a cup of tea and started straight back for a second read. It is that sort of book, one in which a difficult subject is tackled in ways which mean you cannot put it down.
One reason for this is how Goss continually surprises you. The anomaly which affects the baby’s heart seems to relish the destruction of its host, as it flourishes/ to defeat her in the stunning short opening poem of the book, ‘Fetal Heart’. Even the closing section, with its optimistic ‘Welcome’ to a new and healthy baby girl born after the death of her sister, is shot through with images of the heart-killed girl. But these do not come not simply in the form of memories: they are much more visceral than that. Take for example the poem ‘Shadows’:
Clasping your newborn ribs
I see her small bones
beneath your skin.
Your dead sister, visible
like x-ray, is glowing
through your pores.
Goss could have written as if her small bones glowed beneath your skin but she doesn’t. She writes I see her small bones; and even though I know it is phantom, I completely believe her and am horrified to see those small ghost bones. Extraordinary!
Another clue, I believe, to the hypnotic pull of this book is the consistency of its image bank, often to do with machinery and boats. The collection begins with an epigraph from Kate Clanchy’s marvellous Newborn:
Soon, you will make your way out
of this estuary country,
leave the low farms and fog banks…
But Goss’s baby is no sooner out in the sea of life than she is in trouble, drifting, and her death after just 16 months is described as an undocking (‘Severe Ebstein’s Anomaly’), which has the ironic effect of docking her parents (‘A Child Dies in Liverpool’):
Stilled by rain,
we find a bench, sit down where her death
has docked us.
There is something very strange going on in that word docked, a short undemonstrative sort of word, with ironic echoes of doctor and the safety of a dry dock, making it all the more poignant and painful as a result.
Another source of the book’s power, I believe, is to do with pronouns: it was only on second or third reading that I realised that the sick baby is always referred to as her, while each you in the book is either the poet’s husband or her new healthy daughter. Also, the baby is only named Ella on the back cover, never in the poems. Despite describing her doing things like sweating, smiling, panting, even sitting in her highchair grumpy as a gnome, it is as if Goss cannot bear to address Ella directly.
After all, I (and most readers of this book) do not know how it feels to have a child whose heart will not let her grow, who turns all your hopes and dreams to shipwreck. But in addition to the many surprising images, metaphors, haunting turns of phrase in this wonderful collection, I sense that this little quirk of the pronouns carries a huge freight of pain and loss. It does not imply an unwillingness to address the sick baby directly or any lack of empathy for her; but it is perhaps an acknowledgement that the sickness does turn her from a you to a her, to someone with whom the usual direct communication is ultimately (and cruelly) impossible. I find this, like so much else in Goss’s beautiful book, both enlightening and deeply moving.
.
Chris Beckett was born in London but grew up in Ethiopia in the 1960?s. His second collection, Ethiopia Boy, was published in 2013 by Carcanet/Oxford poets and was enthusiastically reviewed in Poetry Review and Poetry London. He also translates Ethiopian poetry into English. More info is on http://www.chrisbeckettpoems.com
By Michael Bartholomew-Biggs • books, poetry reviews, Year 2014