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
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