Poetry books of the month: the republic of parenthood

“Sometimes we are nowhere to be found / or else we stand so close you only see / a great expanse of skin, a slow unblinking eye,” writes Kim Moore in her third collection. From this quietly devastating opening line to the book’s haunting conclusion (“In the next life, if you’re a mouse, / I’ll be tall grass so you can run unnoticed, / or if you’re a brown rat, I’ll be a garden shed / that you can burrow under”), The House of Broken Things is one of the most poignant meditations on motherhood to be published in recent years.

Moore, who is based in Yorkshire, won the Forward prize for best collection for her second book, All the Men I Never Married, in 2022. She excels at hooking in her readers, balancing effortlessness with emotional weight. She then commands attention by fusing seriousness, surprise and subtle humour. These qualities coexist brilliantly in the three-part poem The Trimesters. “Don’t be angry at the ways your body betrays you, the sneeze / and what comes after,” she warns in the first part; and in the third: “The midwife starts to pull at the placenta / as if it’s a stubborn weed.” As Moore knows, a sense of humour is a precious commodity in the testing realm of parenthood, which can seem a place of visceral fear, as in Mothers: “O something very bad could happen / now our hearts are living outside our chests, / tiny hooks buried in the mouths / of our daughters, the eyes of our sons.” 

The speaker has also had to learn to multitask, sustaining attachments in a surprisingly wide array of directions. In On Reading Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick with my Dead Ex-Boyfriend – a sequence a lot more sophisticated than it might sound – a mother’s love comprises ghosts, grey areas and the memory of people we used to be: “You hug me before you go, then lie down / on the road, arms splayed as if you’re cheering, / looking over your shoulder like an owl.” Looking back on her pregnancy, the poet recalls the teeth-grindingly annoying strangers she came up against, “when people say get your sleep now and you think it’s hard now” or “someone else mentions fucking ginger”. She must “learn to smile / when a man says, well, my wife hardly showed!” Yet, despite these frustrations, her love for her child is not diminished: “My life as refuge, my life as harbour, / my life for yours each time,” she writes in the collection’s final lines.

The birth of a child is also a focal point in The Green Parcel by John Challis, another Yorkshire-based poet. Put simply yet spectacularly, it is “the time / the veil thins / between worlds”, he writes. Whether racing through midge-laced heather or crafting beds for beetles from tufts of bog cotton, his daughter triumphs in these poems as a poster girl for pure delight. So it’s a striking contrast when he describes her making baby noises not as cute gurgling but “as if she were / a hard drive / installing an update”. 

The child’s development is considered alongside the broader predicament of time, or lack thereof. As Challis zooms from one place to the next (as in The Orbital, his ode to the M25), it can be hard to keep up: we might find ourselves, like the speaker, with “no time to think” – an uncanny parallel to Moore’s title poem, which honours those “broken mothers and damaged fathers” who “slept the sleep of those who do not / have time to think”. And yet, for Challis, when thoughts crystallise they do so with force: “It isn’t death that bothers / but the loss of her knowledge,” he writes, referring to mother nature in the M25 wetlands. These poems are sharp and satisfying – and can be consumed in stolen moments of parental calm.

While Challis’s 2021 debut collection, The Resurrectionists, dwelled in the working lives of the city – a London cabbie father, a market porter grandfather; cockle pickers, butchers and barrow boys – this second book has a greener and grander canvas. Some poems reflect on Challis’s artists’ residency at Seaton Delaval Hall in Northumberland, while one draws inspiration from the infamous forest outlaw Jack Sheppard. This 18th-century folk hero, who escaped custody four times before his execution at Tyburn, appears in Jack Sheppard Waits for Dawn, facing the gallows and imagining a path where he can roam “carefree as the crow”. 

New parents may at times also dream of freedom and escape. But for both of these poets there is ultimately nothing more delightful, as Moore writes, than this “sweet terror like nothing we have known”.

Motherhood as Refuge by Kim Moore

In the next life, if you’re a mouse,

I’ll be tall grass so you can run unnoticed,

or if you’re a brown rat, I’ll be a garden shed

that you can burrow under, if you’re a seabird

I’ll be a cliff face you can nest on, if you’re a fish

I’ll come out in colours as a coral reef,

if you’re a spider, I’ll be a brick wall

with a creephole for you to hide in.

And if in another life you find you are a bat,

I’ll be the dark you need to hunt in,

I’ll be the barn you need to roost in,

or maybe you’ll find that you’ve come back

as a rarity, a Walney geranium that grows only

in one place, in all the world – then wait for me,

I’ll be that place, I’ll turn myself into Walney Island,

a spit of land grey seals can haul themselves upon,

and even if you come back as something darker,

something harder – a tumour perhaps,

maybe you need a body to live inside,

I will give you mine, here is my bowel,

it will keep you safe from harm, I’ll put myself

at the bottom of every waiting list, turn down

the operation, this was the bargain,

the promise I made to keep you safe from harm,

my life as refuge, my life as harbour,

my life for yours each time.

The Orbital by John Challis

Halo of motorway,

constant roar, petrol scent –

I crane my neck to keep

one eye on the road,

the other on the nomad ground.

Summer nights, a heat haze

rises from the wetlands.

It isn’t death that bothers

but the loss of her knowledge.

There is a clock inside us.

A thought I have no time to think.

Her city, my periphery.

The road’s foot on the pedal.

The House of Broken Things by Kim Moore is published by Corsair (£14.99). The Green Parcel by John Challis  is published on 25 June by Bloodaxe (£12.99). Order a copy of either book from The Observer Shop to receive a 10% discount off RRP. Delivery charges may apply

Photography by Frank Gross/Millennium Images