Poetry review – THE WAY THE WATER HELD ME: Pam Thompson considers Catherine Redford’s poems of bereavement in which Mary Shelley becomes a companion in grief
The Way the Water Held Me
Catherine Redford
The Emma Press
ISBN 9 781915 628541
76 pp £10.99
The poems in this debut collection arise from the poet’s grief after the death of her wife at the age of thirty-three from a terminal illness. Catherine Redford seeks to explore the complexities of caring and bereavement, of grieving emotions, other people’s expectations and all the while continuing life as a single mother, the isolation and loneliness.
A striking feature of the collection is the blending of historical and contemporary worlds. Mary Shelley becomes a significant companion in grief. In “I allow Mary Shelley to create another monster”, the poet/speaker confesses, ‘I fell in love with her as all teenage girls should, / seduced by her dark obsession’, and has, indeed, become a monster, such is her devotion, ‘I offered her my life / and she snatched it, ripping the seams, / restitching it as her own.’ There are parallels in the lives of the two young writers: like Redford, Mary Shelley was widowed young when her husband, Percy Shelley, was drowned in a boating accident. Both writers had moved to different parts of the country, away from friends and family and both were left to bring up young sons alone. The poem transports the poet back into Mary Shelley’s rooms in 1824 into, ‘a resentful companionship’, ‘We wear black and hate them for leaving.’ Mary Shelley famously kept Shelley’s heart. Redford rewrites history and the poem’s ending sees both women, during a walk on Hampstead Heath, actively encouraging the other to move on.
I make her throw his heart into the centre of the lake;
she wipes my wife’s texts from my phone.
Shifting emotional states are reflected in a variety of forms and modes of expression. An authentic voice arises from each of two collage poems made from extracts of Mary Shelley’s writing: a letter to Maria Gisborne, 15th August, 1822, ‘Days pass away / one after the other / I live thus’ (“Mary Shelley writes to tell me that her husband has drowned”), and a novel, The Last Man, which Shelley began after her husband died, which recounts the story of Lionel Verney, who, in the year 2100, becomes the last survivor on earth of a global pandemic:
Grief haunted every deserted road, the earthy smell
of my loneliness deluged the dead earth. Dull rain
buries my hideous wailing … .’
(“Mary Shelley dreams that she is the last woman”)
At other times, Mary Shelley is given a more contemporary voice. Both women have lost children. Shelley wonders if her husband thought of theirs before he died, maybe in seeing a flock of birds, ‘and felt as much part of that chaos / as their beating hearts and wings.’ (“Mary Shelley tells me about the others”). The counterpart is “They are Nine” in which Redford speaks of her lost children. The poem’s title echoes William Wordsworth’s “We are Seven” where a young girl refuses to number only living siblings when asked how many she has. The penultimate line, ‘I watch as they are borne away by the waves’, is from Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. This layering of past and present is effective and moving.
The sea and other bodies of water pulse through the women’s lives, literally and metaphorically. Flowers, ‘arrive like a tsunami’, ‘they flood / the front room, drown what remains of her scent in their condolences’. The poet/speaker recalls washing her partner for the last time and regrets not treasuring the moment more. Redford does not shy away from uncomfortable emotions, ‘I couldn’t bear your helplessness’, ‘I turned my eyes away from the foreign shoreline your body had become’, knowing that she would look back in guilt. Mary Shelley and the poet are often found walking on the seashore together, dragging their widows’ weeds.
Both women, in their own ways, feel ‘lost at sea’, not least in the command of language, ‘The language I mastered is obsolete; / even I am forgetting the elegance of its grammar.’ (“Mary Shelley outlives her husband and friends”). Language, of course, is insufficient, to truly express how grief feels, to cope with the days after bereavement, with the visitors, death administration, and, not least, life as a single parent. In “Performance”, ‘The visitors arrive with cake tins and expectations’, and the poet juxtaposes these happenings with sections in italics which suggest how a widow might behave, like Queen Victoria, for example, ‘the gown’s stiff neck forcing up my chin / like a hand to the throat’. Or Jackie O:
but never
Yoko Ono
never Courtney Love
In “They all ask me how I’m doing”, the speaker presents poem as nightmare with the dreamer/speaker, being adrift, a psychological state which is modelled by the form in short phrases, staggered white spaces and the words’ that’s how I’m doing’ being repeated disturbingly. The opening prose poem, “Everything that’s said in this room is confidential”, features a bereavement counselling session where the counsellor asks the poet to put away a painful memory somewhere safe, ‘with a sturdy lid. She frowns when I say it is a wicker basket.’ Visualisations are a staple in therapy, ‘She summons a field and we walk across it / together in silence.’ I like the way that the end of the session the poet continues in her own way by taking control of the visualisation and in doing so, asserting the reality of her partner’s cremation:
As she vanishes at the top of the lane, I turn back
and sit astride the stile. The sunset slowly burns
itself out. The ground was softer than I’d anticipated.
It only now occurs to me that the coffin, too, was
made of willow, a Moses basket holding her tight.
But the coffin was cremated, not buried, the flames
lifting her into the sky as if they were a rising flood
washing the world completely clean.
Images of both birth and death are fused here. Throughout the collection they are necessarily reckoned with together. In “Waves”, the penultimate poem, the poet remembers her partner, ‘young, bobbing / in the sea that summer in Cornwall’. She tries to age her, ‘to paint your hair silver each time you surface,’ but concludes that ‘The waves will always keep you and I will grow older.’
These are defiant, restless poems. I loved the poem as abstract which is placed cunningly at the end of the book so we don’t take try to read it as an summary of events. Its truths have become evident however:
This poem will examine the ways in which the young
widow becomes a shapeshifter. By day, she is required
to maintain a perfect display of mourning (controlled,
composed, adhering to jet-black convention to appease
the onlookers pressing their moon-faces to the windows).
Yet by night, she finds herself transformed into a
being that is fearful and chaotic …
(“Abstract: Young Widowhood and its Manifestation”)
Fiona Benson refers to these poems as ‘transformative’ and I can see why. They transform the ways we witness expressions of grief and the process of grieving.
Aug 27 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Catherine Redford
Poetry review – THE WAY THE WATER HELD ME: Pam Thompson considers Catherine Redford’s poems of bereavement in which Mary Shelley becomes a companion in grief
The Way the Water Held Me
Catherine Redford
The Emma Press
ISBN 9 781915 628541
76 pp £10.99
The poems in this debut collection arise from the poet’s grief after the death of her wife at the age of thirty-three from a terminal illness. Catherine Redford seeks to explore the complexities of caring and bereavement, of grieving emotions, other people’s expectations and all the while continuing life as a single mother, the isolation and loneliness.
A striking feature of the collection is the blending of historical and contemporary worlds. Mary Shelley becomes a significant companion in grief. In “I allow Mary Shelley to create another monster”, the poet/speaker confesses, ‘I fell in love with her as all teenage girls should, / seduced by her dark obsession’, and has, indeed, become a monster, such is her devotion, ‘I offered her my life / and she snatched it, ripping the seams, / restitching it as her own.’ There are parallels in the lives of the two young writers: like Redford, Mary Shelley was widowed young when her husband, Percy Shelley, was drowned in a boating accident. Both writers had moved to different parts of the country, away from friends and family and both were left to bring up young sons alone. The poem transports the poet back into Mary Shelley’s rooms in 1824 into, ‘a resentful companionship’, ‘We wear black and hate them for leaving.’ Mary Shelley famously kept Shelley’s heart. Redford rewrites history and the poem’s ending sees both women, during a walk on Hampstead Heath, actively encouraging the other to move on.
I make her throw his heart into the centre of the lake;
she wipes my wife’s texts from my phone.
Shifting emotional states are reflected in a variety of forms and modes of expression. An authentic voice arises from each of two collage poems made from extracts of Mary Shelley’s writing: a letter to Maria Gisborne, 15th August, 1822, ‘Days pass away / one after the other / I live thus’ (“Mary Shelley writes to tell me that her husband has drowned”), and a novel, The Last Man, which Shelley began after her husband died, which recounts the story of Lionel Verney, who, in the year 2100, becomes the last survivor on earth of a global pandemic:
Grief haunted every deserted road, the earthy smell
of my loneliness deluged the dead earth. Dull rain
buries my hideous wailing … .’
(“Mary Shelley dreams that she is the last woman”)
At other times, Mary Shelley is given a more contemporary voice. Both women have lost children. Shelley wonders if her husband thought of theirs before he died, maybe in seeing a flock of birds, ‘and felt as much part of that chaos / as their beating hearts and wings.’ (“Mary Shelley tells me about the others”). The counterpart is “They are Nine” in which Redford speaks of her lost children. The poem’s title echoes William Wordsworth’s “We are Seven” where a young girl refuses to number only living siblings when asked how many she has. The penultimate line, ‘I watch as they are borne away by the waves’, is from Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. This layering of past and present is effective and moving.
The sea and other bodies of water pulse through the women’s lives, literally and metaphorically. Flowers, ‘arrive like a tsunami’, ‘they flood / the front room, drown what remains of her scent in their condolences’. The poet/speaker recalls washing her partner for the last time and regrets not treasuring the moment more. Redford does not shy away from uncomfortable emotions, ‘I couldn’t bear your helplessness’, ‘I turned my eyes away from the foreign shoreline your body had become’, knowing that she would look back in guilt. Mary Shelley and the poet are often found walking on the seashore together, dragging their widows’ weeds.
Both women, in their own ways, feel ‘lost at sea’, not least in the command of language, ‘The language I mastered is obsolete; / even I am forgetting the elegance of its grammar.’ (“Mary Shelley outlives her husband and friends”). Language, of course, is insufficient, to truly express how grief feels, to cope with the days after bereavement, with the visitors, death administration, and, not least, life as a single parent. In “Performance”, ‘The visitors arrive with cake tins and expectations’, and the poet juxtaposes these happenings with sections in italics which suggest how a widow might behave, like Queen Victoria, for example, ‘the gown’s stiff neck forcing up my chin / like a hand to the throat’. Or Jackie O:
but never
Yoko Ono
never Courtney Love
In “They all ask me how I’m doing”, the speaker presents poem as nightmare with the dreamer/speaker, being adrift, a psychological state which is modelled by the form in short phrases, staggered white spaces and the words’ that’s how I’m doing’ being repeated disturbingly. The opening prose poem, “Everything that’s said in this room is confidential”, features a bereavement counselling session where the counsellor asks the poet to put away a painful memory somewhere safe, ‘with a sturdy lid. She frowns when I say it is a wicker basket.’ Visualisations are a staple in therapy, ‘She summons a field and we walk across it / together in silence.’ I like the way that the end of the session the poet continues in her own way by taking control of the visualisation and in doing so, asserting the reality of her partner’s cremation:
As she vanishes at the top of the lane, I turn back
and sit astride the stile. The sunset slowly burns
itself out. The ground was softer than I’d anticipated.
It only now occurs to me that the coffin, too, was
made of willow, a Moses basket holding her tight.
But the coffin was cremated, not buried, the flames
lifting her into the sky as if they were a rising flood
washing the world completely clean.
Images of both birth and death are fused here. Throughout the collection they are necessarily reckoned with together. In “Waves”, the penultimate poem, the poet remembers her partner, ‘young, bobbing / in the sea that summer in Cornwall’. She tries to age her, ‘to paint your hair silver each time you surface,’ but concludes that ‘The waves will always keep you and I will grow older.’
These are defiant, restless poems. I loved the poem as abstract which is placed cunningly at the end of the book so we don’t take try to read it as an summary of events. Its truths have become evident however:
This poem will examine the ways in which the young
widow becomes a shapeshifter. By day, she is required
to maintain a perfect display of mourning (controlled,
composed, adhering to jet-black convention to appease
the onlookers pressing their moon-faces to the windows).
Yet by night, she finds herself transformed into a
being that is fearful and chaotic …
(“Abstract: Young Widowhood and its Manifestation”)
Fiona Benson refers to these poems as ‘transformative’ and I can see why. They transform the ways we witness expressions of grief and the process of grieving.