Rachel Bower
-
Two poems by Rachel Bower
© Jan Bella Cannula after Matthew Siegel The sea is not as white as I expected. A lifeguard tapes gauze on my baby’s hand, secures the pad. It’s okay, it’ll be over soon. The waves splash to my belly. My breasts leak, a turquoise vein swells. A woman once stood to…
-
Writing Birth: on the poetry of motherhood
Rachel Bower In her 1995 work Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (Carcanet), Eavan Boland described a powerful dilemma at the heart of women’s writing about motherhood. She suggested that ‘the woman poet today is caught in a field of force’, offering an example of the…