Thanks very much for signing up to my newsletter. Here’s the bookish or book-adjacent bits and pieces that have been occupying me over the past few weeks. (You can find more of this kind of thing on my website, too)

Milestones

When I edited Night Feeds and Morning Songs, I included poems about every stage of motherhood – from the first words and staggering steps to the flight from the nest. I love the reminders they give us that though the days are long – and they certainly seem so when they’re filled with tense negotiations about pants and snacks – the years are short.

Some of the verses take me back: to that tentative first pram-pushing, wincing at the joins in the pavement, or the electric moment in which your baby makes eye contact, perhaps gives a dignified but wobbly nod, and actually notices you.

I love, though, that so many of the poems celebrate the miraculous, if sometimes exasperating separateness of someone who was once a part of yourself. It is both a sweet pain and a liberation that they will be who are they are. Christy Ducker describes her baby so beautifully as ‘you and young and other’. ‘What we began,’ writes Anne Ridler, ‘Is now its own.’

What could match the delighted thrill of the mastered clap, the point, the high five and the blown raspberry, or the profoundly serious inaugural performance of bobbin winding? We rhapsodised over the first picture that looked like a face, heralding a year’s worth of artistic endeavours boasting peculiarly expressive potato people (“You have three legs, like a spider, Mummy! And you’re sad.”)

Some milestones are almost universal: all those scraps of child swamped by a stiff school uniform smiling uncertainly on the doorstep. But we each cherish private moments of transition too. I remember exchanging awed looks with my husband the first time we heard our elder daughter take herself to the loo independently at night – not an occasion there’s a greeting cards range for – and a friend still speaks with pleasure-glazed eyes about the weekend morning when she first read the newspaper in peace. Every family has their own waymarkers on this road.

There are poems in the book I love for their clear-eyed and hilariously credible portraits of children, from Degna Stone’s 4-and-a-half-year-old – ‘She’s a bit of a laugh that ends up in court’ – to Caroline Bird’s tiny tyrants:

‘Imagine expecting universal loyalty whilst flinging

spaghetti hoops at the wall!’

These poems paint real kids, in all their eccentric, grubby pomp. I recognise in these pages women whose children have, like my own strong-minded youngest, devoted many hours to howling on floors about injustices including – but not limited to – being presented with a less fancy spoon, the suggestion of a jumper, the offer to peel a tangerine or a dog leaving.

I love, too, the poems I found that let me imagine, for a moment, times to come. Rachel Hadas in her poem ‘The Red Hat’ (this month’s featured poem, below) speaks of the first semi-independent walks to school, the parent’s heart stretching ‘elastic in its love and fear’ after a striding son. And there is rugby, and nights out, fashionable clothes and necessary secrets and the long slow letting go, and these poems are as beautiful and devastating as any set on the labour ward. I asked my own mother about when I left home – I don’t remember glancing backwards even for an instant – and she wrote to me, with perfect, agonising words, that the waves of desolation felt like ‘homesickness in reverse’. We lose ourselves a little in our children, but we live in them too.

This piece is adapted from Night Feeds and Morning Songs, a collection of poems about every stage of motherhood.

Writing and Talking

I’m really looking forward to talking about the hidden history of women’s writing for a free online event hosted by Richmond Libraries on International Women’s Day, Tuesday 8th March, at 8pm. You can book a free ticket here.

I shared poems about space, dinosaurs and whales with groups of Year 3 and Year 4 children at a local school this month. It so much fun! More information here, if you’d like to book me for a school event.

I’m resharing this Art UK piece on portraits of women writers in national collections to mark the paperback release of She Will Soar. It was fascinating to research, and I love the photograph of a young Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath and the painting of Edith Sitwell by Wyndam Lewis.

Recommended reading

Featured poem

Here’s one of the milestone poems referenced above, from Night Feeds and Morning Songs. We’re not there yet and although I whinge about the school run, I’m so aware that the little hands in mine and the stream of bonkers questions are an immense privilege.

The Red Hat

It started before Christmas. Now our son

Officially walks to school alone.

Semi-alone, it’s accurate to say:

I or his father track him on the way.

He walks up on the east side of West End,

we on the west side. Glances can extend

(and do) across the street; not eye contact.

Already ties are feeling and not fact.

Straus Park is where these parallel paths part;

he goes alone from there. The watcher’s heart

stretches, elastic in its love and fear,

towards him as we see him disappear,

striding briskly. Where two weeks ago,

holding a hand, he’d dawdle, dreamy, slow,

he now is hustled forward by the pull

of something far more powerful than school.

The mornings we turn back to are no more

than forty minutes longer than before,

but they feel vastly different – flimsy, strange,

wavering in the eddies of this change,

empty, unanchored, perilously light

since the red hat vanished from our sight.

Rachel Hadas

From the blog

Other bookish stuff

• I absolutely loved this Intelligence Squared Podcast in which Amy Jeffs, author of Storyland, and Charlotte Higgins, author of Greek Myths, talk about their wonderful books.

• Author Anna Mazzola (whose new book The Clockwork Girl looks great) has been running some interviews about the publishing process on her blog. As someone with literally no visual sense whatsoever but strong opinions on book jackets, I thought this interview with designer Micaela Alcaino was really interesting.

• This is a bracingly honest post: On writing and publishing books when you have little children, by American agent Anna Sproul-Latimer. I came to this via Sara Fredman’s excellent Write Like A Mother newsletter.

• I still haven’t read Sheila Heti though I have Motherhood on my TBR. This interview says her new novel Pure Colour is ‘about middle age, that point in life when “the party is happening behind a closed door”, as the book puts it, when there aren’t so many questions to be asked, just things to deal with.’ This line jumped out at me: it expresses my frustration with coming of age stories, many of which no longer speak to me, no matter how brilliantly written they are. Lifestage mood reading: it’s a thing, nothing is right for everyone, and I think it’s OK. More about this in a previous newsletter here.

• Larissa @Thefloatingbookworm is hosting a fundraising auction on Saturday 19th March at 1pm on her Instagram Stories to support the people of Ukraine. Literary Agent Hayley Steed is also running a book auction raising money for British Ukrainian Aid with some wonderful lots to bid on from 7th March.

• With the caveat that I entirely understand why people might find it upsetting, personally I loved the BBC’s adaptation of Adam Kay’s This is Going to Hurt (even if there were bits I watched from behind the sofa.) The pressure on staff in the NHS is incredible, and I’m so grateful that people step up to these jobs. I wouldn’t last a week.

• I found so much to think about in this brilliant Poetry Exchange podcast in which Casey Bailey discusses Liz Berry’s beautiful poem ‘The Way Home’.

• I’m devouring content related to Lauren Groff’s excellent Matrix. Should you find yourself equally obsessed, do check out the Book Club Review podcast review, the Guardian appraisal and the Sewanee Podcast interview with Lauren.

Thanks for reading! Any feedback would be gratefully received, and if you enjoyed this newsletter please don’t hesitate to share with likeminded readers.