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Review of Her Birth- Rebecca Goss, The Guardian, 5th October 2013

  When Rebecca Goss's daughter, Ella, died aged just 16 months, Goss found herself speechless. Ella had been diagnosed at birth with Ebstein's anomaly- a rare condition in which the heart's tricuspid valve fails to form properly. The severity of her case meant there was no hope of treatment; the wonder was she clung to life for as long as she did. 'There were days', Goss wrote, in a recent blog post on the weeks after Ella's death, 'when I could not speak. One particular day, my husband and I went for a drive, in silence. Not the silence we had sometimes known before: both of us sulking, after a petty row. This was a dumbstruck silence. We were dumbstruck by what had happened to us'.

    Ella died in 2008. Published five years later, Her Birth- shortlisted for the 2013 Forward prize- is Goss's attempt to master the silence; to bear witness to her daughter's small life, and to articulate the grief that overthrew her after her death. The poems themselves are brief, spare, honeycombed with blank spaces- lingering scraps of dead air- but taken together, they speak with extraordinary clarity. Goss is telling her daughter's story, here: the book opens with Ella's birth and then advances chronologically, with a forward momentum unusual in a poetry collection. Reading it, I found myself gripped.

    The difficulty with a collection such as this is to consider it objectively; to separate subject from technique, and work out which you're responding to. Clearly, for Goss, this is essential poetry: one has the sense that she's writing for herself and for her daughter, rather than for an imagined, critical, reader. But Goss was a poet before her daughter's death, and even in the midst of heartbreak, her skill is evident. In 'Print', one of the finest poems in the collection, Goss takes an image of near-unbearable poignancy- Ella's 'prints. / Hands and feets, pencil grey, / as if they stood her in soot', handed to them by a nurse- and examines it with a judicious poet's eye; considering it for what it's not ('I wanted her handprint // to come home on the sugar paper: bright yellow, ready for the fridge'), and concluding with the discovery of another print, accidentally preserved; its randomness a lancing reminder of how absolutely her daughter was in the world, and how irretrievably she is gone from it.

    Structurally, too, Goss exercises a deftness that pays tribute to her material. Her poems intercut the medical with the mundane- the echocardiograms, the toast- in a manner that rings true to anyone who has spent tim dealing with long illness, but which also provides a poetic balance. The handful of poems in which Ella figures- 'fingers / wrapped tight / on the bar' of a swing; 'blonde floss of her hair / sticky at her neck'- are almost invariably set in couplets, establishing a binary rhythm which pulses in the background, even as the poems themselves track the faltering beats of her heart. And the moment of her death comes early in the collection, just a dozen poems in, the suddenness with which we arrive at it creating an echo of the reality that Goss and her husband lived through: a trauma that far outlasted the short span of Ella's life.

    The poem in which Ella's death is recorded is a jumbled, wrenching mix of vision, metaphor and medical terminology; the death itself an 'undocking' in which her parents are required to 'let her come adrift' (the collection is awash with images of water). In the following poem, in which Goss describes the immediate aftermath, silence- or something like it- briefly reasserts itself: the shock of Ella's passing is so great that the title, 'A Child Dies in Liverpool', shifts into a dissociative, journalistic third person. 'Stilled by rain, / we find a bench, sit down where her death / has docked us,' the poem ends: where it's possible to imaginatively conjure their daughter's death as a floating-free for her, they themselves have been stranded by it. 'Going home, back down / the river road, will be a foreign route without her.'

    For all its anguish, this is not a collection that submits to despair. The book's final section, 'Welcome', opens with 'Why We Had Another Baby', and  over the next handful of poems- some of the best of the collection, in which Goss charts her anxiety and ambivalence, guilt renewed sorrow and relief- a new child finally emerges; 'a healthy child / with all that waits: the bike, school, // mild and curable diseases'. 'Come and hold my hand, little one,' the final poem ends,

    stand beside me in your small shoes,

    Let's head for your undiscovered
           life,
    your mother's ready now, let's run.

    'People turn to poetry in times of crisis,' said the US poet laureate WS Merwin, 'because it comes closer than any other art form to addressing what cannot be said.' In Her Birth, Rachael Goss has let silence speak, and in her bringing together of subject and medium, questions of objectivity are chased out of the window. I'm sure I won't be the only reader to finish the book in tears.
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