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Her Birth

Rebecca Goss

Cover of Her Birth by Rebecca Goss
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Categories: 21st Century, British, Women
Imprint: Northern House
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (80 pages)
(Pub. Jul 2013)
9781847772381
£9.95 £8.96
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(Pub. Jul 2013)
9781847774453
£9.95 £8.96
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  • Description
  • Excerpt
  • Author
  • Contents
  • Awards
  • Reviews
  •                 ...clover
    with an unlucky lobe,
    the rarest of anomalies
    that would flourish
    and defeat her


    from ‘Foetal Heart’
    Shortlisted for the 2013 Forward Prize for Best Collection

    Shortlisted for the 2015 Warwick Prize for Writing

    Selected for Next Generation Poets 2014



    In 2007 Rebecca Goss’s newborn daughter Ella was diagnosed with Severe Ebstein’s Anomaly, a rare and incurable heart condition. She lived for sixteen months. Her Birth is a book-length sequence of poems beginning with Ella’s birth, her short life and her death, and ending with the joys and complexities that come with the birth of another child. Goss navigates the difficult territory of grief and loss in poems that are spare, tender and haunting: ‘Going home, back down / the river road, will be a foreign route without her’.


    It must be at once the most painfully personal and the most restrained and sparsely written poetry collection of the year... It's poetry of witness. The language is simple; the images are simple; the feeling is all. It's feeling no one wants to have, and it is handled with immense grace.
    Katy Evans-Bush, Poetry London

    Something close to a poetic journal, the poems are by turns meditative and bewildered, uttered in the quietest of delicately weighted language, as if the failing child and the experience alike could not bear too much pressure or noise. What transformations there are, are tentative and quietly sustained.
    Jane Draycott, Canto

    She [writes] with astonishing success, to which the key is a brilliant sparseness consistently adding up to more than the sum of its parts. Her linguistic tact and her judgement never falter...
    Lawrence Sail, Warwick Review

    The poems have an almost unbearable beauty...
    Peter Kennedy, poetrywivenhoe

    The poems in Her Birth unfold their story of love, loss and grief for a baby daughter with pared-down precision and scorching intensity.
    Helen Dunmore
    Echo
    Fetal Heart
    Room in a Hospital
    Skin-to-Skin
    Toast
    Clinic
    Echo
    Palliative
    A Dream of Heart Babies
    I Sweat When I
    Swings
    Ward at Night
    Severe Ebstein’s Anomaly
    A Child Dies in Liverpool
    Post
    St Mary’s
    Her Birth

    Mining
    The Postmistress
    Honey
    Stretch Marks
    The Highchair
    Print
    Mining
    You’re Lucky You Can Dream About Her
    October
    Muscovado Sugar
    My Neighbour’s Himalayan Birch
    The 21st of March
    Mothers of the Dead
    Found
    Helpline
    The Lights
    Sunday Papers
    Grief Goes Jogging
    Peeing at the Odeon
    Repair
    Another

    Welcome
    Why We Had Another Baby
    Test
    Hyperemesis Gravidarum
    As Owls Do
    Clothes
    Welcome
    Shadows
    My Animal
    Lost
    Bench
    Telling the Tale
    In Memory of John Ernest Goss 1920–2011
    Snail
    Moon
    Taking You There
    Last Poem

    Acknowledgements
    Rebecca Goss is a poet, tutor and mentor living in Suffolk. Her first full-length collection, The Anatomy of Structures, was published by Flambard Press in 2010. Her second collection, Her Birth (Carcanet/Northern House, 2013), was shortlisted for the 2013 Forward Prize for Best Collection, won the Poetry category in the ... read more
    Awards won by Rebecca Goss Short-listed, 2019  The East Anglian Book (Poetry) Award (Girl) Winner, 2014 East Anglian Book Awards for Poetry (Her Birth) Short-listed, 2015 The Portico Prize for Literature (Her Birth) Short-listed, 2015 The Warwick Prize for Writing (Her Birth) Short-listed, 2013 The Forward Prize for Best Collection (Her Birth)
    'The pieces form a narrative sequence that are variously painful, jealous, hopeful, and tender ... This fine balancing act between emotional and cathartic resulted in the collection being nominated for the 2013 Forward Prize for Best Collection of Poetry. Yet beyond any industry accolades, Her Birth is all about feeling and the grace to accept and move on with life'
    Susan Darlington, Spectrum Culture
    Praise for Rebecca Goss 'Latch interweaves past and present and absorbs the reader in this journey. The poems have a ghostly quality, particularly in the startling, haunting Woman Returns... poems, where the woman is both present and a spirit from the past and future. Through Goss's exceptionally skilled choice of language and form, the poems imbue their meaning. The collection left me with a sense that not only the personas but the emotions, traumatic and joyous, are still held there in the environment.'
    Selina Rodrigues, Magma
     'Tender, lyrical and deftly crafted, Goss's poems reveal the complexity of family life, especially the closeness and unspoken love in the bond between mother and daughter, while capturing one's need for love, and the difficult reconciliation of longings and dreams.'
    Jennifer Wong, The Poetry Review
    'In this beautiful collection, Rebecca Goss weaves together memory and myth... Her writing is lucid and seemingly effortless.'
    Louise Warren, London Grip
    'Latch, Rebecca Goss' fourth collection is on first reading, rich, thick, and full of complexity, with concentrated ideas and complex strings of imagery... Deep, thoughtful, and affecting.'
    Mab Jones, Buzz Mag
    'Latch repays several re-readings. The intertwining of themes, memory and the fluidity of time makes for a very evocative collection steeped in a personal discovery of what it means to both re-live and create a sense of home.
    Sue Wallace-Shaddad, Alchemy Spoon
    'Latch brings us an evocation of the past which avoids the pitfalls of sentimentality or nostalgia. Instead here is something sharp, joyful and interrogating: a bright, taut view of a rural English childhood. Her astute eye lets nothing through as the latch of memory and the blacksmith's making become a vehicle for a poised engagement with the shifting roles of motherhood across time.'
    Deryn Rees-Jones
    'This collection collapses the boundaries between land and lineage, is filled with portent, vestige, longing. I don't know how it's possible for these poems to be so intimate, yet vast. They beat fiercely with bird-animal-human hearts.'
    Tishani Doshi
    'Tenderness between mothers and daughters is the collection's keynote . . . graceful, measured and joyous'
    Suzannah V. Evans, TLS
    'It is clearly with great skill that Goss demonstrates how one can be close to a subject, yet simultaneously far away... Girl can be read as a neutral document of experiences that observe details in the same way that one would collate data points. It is a chronology of moments that neither indicate the speaker's interest or ennui; they are simply pieces of an individual life.'
    Sarah-Jean Zubair, Poetry London
    'Goss contiunes to mine distinctive terrain which makes the best of her poetry compelling... these poems are impressive for launching seams of intense emotion from so minimalist a source'
    Ellen Cranitch, The Poetry Review
     'Rebecca Goss's poems have their own sure authority; they are never ostentatious or trendily experimental, and her voice rings out clear, promising always more to come'
    Patricia McCarthy, Agenda Ekphrastic Issue
    'A passionate, tender, thrilling book.'
    Helen Mort
    'This is a book about human bodies: freckles, fists, itches and that 'private reek'. Graphic, funny and tender, these poems jostle with bodies that swim, jog, fuck, medicate, spin on dodgems, grow up and grow ill. Rebecca Goss captures both the pleasure and the pain. Girl is a quivering, kicking reminder of what it is to be alive.'
    Clare Pollard
    'From the first poem about a mother struck by lightning, closely followed by the delicate, intimate and equally astonishing title poem, 'Girl' - the first of a series inspired by Alison Watt's paintings that are threaded throughout this collection - I was totally gripped. Rebecca Goss's voice is quietly passionate. Her forms are exquisitely crafted. Her themes, of human fragility and of our bodies' capacity for pleasure and pain, are universal.'
    Vicki Feaver
    'The people in these poems are split down the middle - by lightening, by the 'marquise cut' of birth, by love, and yet beauty flies from the breakage, something 'large, planetary'. These are poems of brave surrender to the accident of living, the constant somersault, and regardless of whether the change is huge or tiny - a thunderbolt or an unexpected freckle - it is always fundamental, always shattering, always a thrill.'
    Caroline Bird
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