Launching Unable Mother

V. Press is very very delighted to launch Helen Calcutt's debut poetry collection Unable Mother.

“This work challenges our abstract and cosy notions of motherhood with a brutal and vulnerable delve into the psyche. Calcutt grapples, sometimes violently, sometimes with aching tenderness, each hard-won line ‘like squeezing / flesh and fruit from the bone, / this terrible love’. Yet these poems reach even further, into the rent world, and the remarkable kinds of beauty to which poetry alone can allude. This is an intimate book, the kind that comes in close to your ear to whisper dark secrets and unavoidable truths. These poems are spare, careful, insistent--and devastatingly good.” Robert Peake

“Helen Calcutt’s poems are full of surprising and intricate moments - they unfold like origami, deftly packing and unpacking themselves into new forms and presenting the reader with confidences, secrets and insight, the tender words for the things that are hard to say. In their explorations of motherhood, loss and discovery, Calcutt’s poetry is steeled with precise language, always finding clarity forged in the heart of experience.  These are intimate poems which are felt in the body, and written with a keen physicality – ‘love is meant to live on in the body’ writes Calcutt, ‘My flesh making heaven of it.’ In their makings and re-makings, each poem here reveals this to be a remarkable and potent debut.” Jane Commane

Unable Mother is very revelatory and very achingly poised.

R.R.P. £9.99

A sample poem from the collection can be enjoyed below.

BUY Unable Mother now, using the paypal link below. 

Unable Mother (including P&P)

Unable Mother (including P&P for the U.K. only) £12.50 GBP Unable Mother (including P&P for Rest of the World) £17.50 GBP

The listening tree

I don’t know when this began. I have an ear

for the beautiful/terrible 

sounds, soaked with rain.

With my hearing in such leaves,

I can bear the worst of human music.

I’ve gone so very far, listening 

without moving. My roots are bound 

by ribbons in the earth

which lengthen into my back

and I sway, as it happens 

in these roots from my back. I listen,

and sleep between the dark 

and the dark

where my hearing is suspended.

And between this and my skull, 

it’s all dark matter, 

where earth and her sweetness

have darkened to gather each

bone to a bone, 

every coil to a chord.

I sing, though you wouldn’t know it.

My mouth is sunk in a pool

of old life,

it glitters and tries

to sing of its light,

and cries owl-cries

for a secret way out. Still, I bend

my thick spine 

to bare my neck, and touch you. 

You could almost be a stranger 

who's found me by a road,

you hold out your arms

as if you hold the great world,

you place your hands 

on my body and hair. Your tears 

catch on the quiet in the air,

and shake and glitter with the shakings 

of your hair;

something in your shape 

is like a tree, like me. I barely brush you

and your mouth comes alive on my light, 

I barely sigh I am a temple, I am 

soaking you with light.

If I could birth myself a second time,

I’d have your soul.  

You rock and sigh ‘oh I’m done, Mother,

I’m done.’  But the young, my love,

are free, or didn’t you know? There’s no 

god in this world. 

The closest thing to prayer is 

a child who says she hurts.

Unable Mother's cover image ‘Retreat’ by Katherine Sheers (http://www.katherinesheers.com/)