This is going to be different from the usual sort of review
you write after reading work by someone you don’t know or have only heard of by
repute. I came to Echolocation having worked with Becky, during 2014 under the
Cinnamon Press mentor scheme, principally on her first collection, Empires of Clay. I did see some of the
poems included in Echolocation but its creation came after we’d finished the
mentorship. So with that declaration of interest out of the way, what should
the reader make of the fifteen poems in Echolocation.
As the blurb says this is ‘an assured body of work… which
does not succumb to sentimentality’.
At its heart is the theme of mothering in all its
manifestations; being mothered as in Eucharist
and Lullabies and it deals unflinchingly
and without sentiment with being a single parent, infertility, fostering,
adoption and illness. There are layers and layers to many of the poems and
returning to some of them after having not read them for a while it is like
reading them anew.
They are poems about what it is like to be human too, to be
determined to keep going
and this she knows
now, distinct ad the taste of brick dust
-
she will
never leave him
Lone Parent
holy trinities of
how the day before had been,
what we’d loved,
and why.
Eucharist
It would be a pity for you to discount these poems
because you’ve never been a mother or have no intention or possibility of being
one. Do read them.
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