Tag: motherhood

Flashbacks and Flowers

My Mother Taught Me How to Sing and Graveyards in My Closet

Welsh boys and their mothers, eh? A cup of milky tea, a hunk of barabrith and mammy’s becardiganed cwtch – these have a Proustian ability to melt the …

Telling your father at Bwlch Nant yr Arian

                  We’re going to have a baby, I told your father, just days since I’d felt his ribs slot like coins between mine. We were toeing a mou …

Wales Book of the Year 2019 at Aberystwyth

Literature Wales held the Wales Book of the Year 2019 at Aberystwyth’s Art Centre on the twentieth of June. It was a night to honour those for whom Wa …

Hand and Skull

Zoe Brigley’s third collection of poetry is a tender exploration of gender, cruelty, violence, myth, motherhood and physicality. Sometimes unsettling, …

Jumping Frogs

I write this twenty-eight weeks into pregnancy. I write while sitting in my living room, surrounded by the detritus of baby preparations and poetry su …

Unpicking the Locks

Last year, a message on our answerphone for our twelve-year-old son took us all by surprise. It was from the Poetry Society and told Morgan that his p …

Mothering Song

Since you’ve gone, the rosebuds have opened, the birds that ate from our feeder have raised their young, the ivy has stretched its arm further, hugs t …

Dear Body

In the shower, my mum is a Picasso drawing – the diagonals of her crutches, shell-scoops of her breasts, the folded cloth of her back and the jut of h …

Straw Dolly

At night, the seamstress, her needles plucked from a leather wallet, comes to sew me up. Mouth and nose, eyes and legs, perineum – flower name… …