A collection of 44 poems touching on pain and mental illness but also throwing a mystical light on the textual darkness, some poems having appeared previously in other publications. Shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize 2005 for the best new collection published in the UK in 2005.

Casgliad o 44 cerdd yn cyffwrdd ar boen a salwch meddwl gan daflu hefyd rywfaint o oleuni cyfriniol ar y tywyllwch testunol; mae rhai cerddi wedi ymddangos eisoes mewn cyhoeddiadau eraill. Ar restr fer Gwobr T S Eliot 2005 am y casgliad newydd gorau yng ngwledydd Prydain yn 2005.

Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Award 2005

This extraordinary collection follows the author’s highly praised The Zoo Father. Most of the poems in The Huntress are written as if by a daughter about her mother. The long central poem ‘At the Gate of Secrets’ is a dialogue between mother and daughter, where the narrator has become a deer in a forest to escape her mother and the mother is her huntress, and I'd assume the title comes from this. They do vary – some of the later poems are about the narrator’s feelings for her father and lover. The collection will be remembered mostly, though, for its remarkable depiction of a tense, bitter mother and daughter relationship, where the mother is mentally ill.

These are very beautiful poems, managing to make a disparate selection of images feel logically connected – orchids, snakes, mythic gods, mirrors, kitchens are among the images that are repeated and repeated throughout the book, that she is able to bring together into a coherent visual world in her work. Her mother is, among other metaphors, a horse, a praying mantis, rock crystal, a singing bowl. The daughter is sometimes the victim, sometimes the aggressor; the mother sometimes to be feared, sometimes pitied, as in the ‘The Rattlesnake Mother’ where she begins as something fearsome and by the last lines: ‘I think now how hard it was for her/ to be a rattlesnake, how hated she was/ by all the animal kingdom.’ This range of images, which in a less able poet’s work would be overwhelming, come together as one reads the collection to give a very rich, layered and convincing picture of such a difficult relationship.

These are dense poems that require concentration and some unpicking by the reader. When I first started reading them, I struggled a little with the mythology I didn’t know, for example Xipe Totec, Aztec god of springtime in ‘Portrait of my Mother as Xipe Totec’. But as I kept reading them, and these are poems you can read and read and find new images in all the time, what struck me was the poet’s genius for simple visual and sensual images that are clear and true for anyone: ‘Matron leans over/my nine-year old mother/ in a white habit woven from silence’ (‘The Children’s Asylum’) or ‘until her scent grew so strong I could taste the coins in the bottom of her handbag’ (‘My Mother’s Perfume’). These sudden simple, quiet sentences stop you in your tracks as you are reading. Often I found the impact genuinely breathtaking.

In short, this is a hugely original, beautiful and hard-hitting collection that I would recommend to anyone.

Janet Thomas


It is possible to use this review for promotional purposes, but the following acknowledgement should be included: A review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Welsh Books Council.

Gellir defnyddio’r adolygiad hwn at bwrpas hybu, ond gofynnir i chi gynnwys y gydnabyddiaeth ganlynol: Adolygiad oddi ar www.gwales.com, trwy ganiatad Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru.