...clover
with an unlucky lobe,
the rarest of anomalies
that would flourish
and defeat her

from ‘Foetal Heart’

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’.


'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