SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2013 FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION 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'.
Rebecca Goss was born in 1974 and grew up in Suffolk. She studied English at Liverpool John Moores University and has an MA in Creative Writing from Cardiff University. Her first full-length collection, The Anatomy of Structures, was published in 2010 by Flambard Press. She has recently moved back to Suffolk after twenty years in Liverpool, where she taught creative writing at Liverpool John Moores University. She is married, has raised her two step - children, and now combines writing full-time with caring for her young daughter.
Title: Her Birth
Author: Rebecca Goss
ISBN: 9781847772381
Binding:
Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
Publication Date: 2013-07-01
Number of Pages: 80
Weight: 0.1000 kg
'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.' --Jane Draycott, Canto magazine '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, author, The Siege
