Blood Mother

In her passionate second collection of poetry, Blood Mother, Su Croll casts fresh light on the timeless maternal life of women. Collating singular moments in the unfolding narrative of birth, she draws us into the emotional interior and shifting identity that comes with new motherhood, from the simple desire for children to the chaos and pain of labour, from the meditation on a child's first breath to the long-wanted birth of a second child. Always mindful of the relationships between mothers and tackling the feminist challenge of representation, Croll asks how mothers are meant to see themselves when the language itself seems insufficient. How is a woman supposed to express the strange miracle of mothering without falling into "a soft sponge of hopeless cliché"? What "lattice of wording," Croll wonders, is enough to convey this "ridiculous and contradicting trick" of nurturing new life? Set against Alberta's urban and natural spaces, Blood Mother answers with remarkable originality in poems that never background the frustrations of motherhood while celebrating the rapturous pleasures that many women are summoned to in giving birth to their children and our families.