The Snow Globe by Jenny Pagdin

The Snow Globe

Jenny Pagdin (Nine Arches Press 2024)

These poems speak to the author’s experience of postpartum psychosis, a traumatic condition that affects some women who have recently given birth. I am drawn to the honesty of the poems which take the reader through a narrative of love, healing and descriptions of the fragile. The blending of the binary extremes of lightness and darkness is a constant source of intrigue.

A Mother’s investment is vividly clear in the opening of the poem Milk-tooth:

I blindly pat the mattress to claim your first tooth

till one fingertip catches

on a hollow root tapering to bluntness

so big in your mouth, so small on my palm.

built with mother’s milk, Calpol syringes

and soggy muslins.

Pagdin’s imagery is powerful at times, as exemplified by the end of the poem Heavenly:

they soon had me in an institution, eddying

till the planet turned under its tape of stars

and to this day I can get jittery

because the sky just goes on and on

overcast, the tousled strands unwinding,

raw wool -

In the poem Snow globe, the free verse sticks like sweat and only slowly evaporates:

The nurse said it wasn’t my fault.

evening dust played in the window

while I handed round parsley with Ophelia,

thinking she meant the sheets.

This is a courageous collection, and I am driven to read more about this type of trauma.

Stephen Paul Wren