Signature Editions

In her passionate second collection of poetry, Blood Mother, Su Croll casts fresh light on the timeless maternal life of women. Collating singular moments in the unfolding narrative of birth, she draws us into the emotional interior and shifting identity that comes with new motherhood, from the simple desire for children to the chaos and pain of labour, from the meditation on a child’s first breath to the long-wanted birth of a second child.

Always mindful of the relationships between mothers and tackling the feminist challenge of representation, Croll asks how mothers are meant to see themselves when the language itself seems insufficient. How is a woman supposed to express the strange miracle of mothering without falling into "a soft sponge of hopeless / cliché"? What "lattice of wording," Croll wonders, is enough to convey this "ridiculous and contradicting / trick" of nurturing new life? Set against Alberta’s urban and natural spaces, Blood Mother answers with remarkable originality in poems that never background the frustrations of motherhood while celebrating the rapturous pleasures that many women are summoned to in giving birth to their children and our families.

fruitful

we are fallen into words
flimsy female language
a dialect of oranges and asters
we say flowery because of the light
insubstantial purple swollen
plums of language that are read
as purple prose and to be newly
in leaf and blossom to be fresh
picked a budding rose
is to be light womanly
there is no non-gendered language
though even the presence of the word
gender and its other
hidden face already weigh down
this leafy construction I am left
wordless unable to explain
my fertile ovulating conceiving gestating
labouring delivering lactating
body I should stop
trying for more formidable words
more heavy-weight dialogue
because the language of vegetation
of fruit and flowers of ocean
and moon is the shape women have
taken in language our blood clichéd
and rooting us to nature
the only way we can be
described

lungs forced open

as if accuracy were an end in itself
I don't know how to live

I don't know clocks and I don't
know leaves yellow in the wide

flat palm of prairie to foot
hills I am living in I don't know

what part of the country from colours
practically unfamiliar what time

of day what season I barely know
my husband at this altitude

in this west how he lives
and moves through the high

and dry of this air he walks
across a river to a downtown

job I can’t imagine I don't
know how to live there's breathing

and eating and looking at yellow
trees before wind takes

their leaves I don't know
how the television can

stand itself brewing pictures
frenzied crowds forcing open

locked doors I don't
know how the barricades

can endure I only know
my stubborn stretched skin

barricading the body and life
forcing itself on a flesh

coloured wind of shrill
oxygen into my daughter's open

mouth the moment she was pulled
blue from my slit

open
abdomen that slim red

scalpel line marking me
in that second before life begins

with breathing
I don't know anything

but the body the body
of this western city the country

of my own body residence of my daughter
my heart

blood mother

in art god sucks life
from the breast of the virgin
a hard breast held like a lean pear
in his hands this picture is christened
madonna of humility
as if in giving life she is drained
of power yet god
grows fat on the milk that is
mirrored in the painted
air above her as stars
of the milky way decorate ceilings
in church her name is humility
as if the milk is not everything
this wash of milk from the human mother
as if it is not gifted from the body
of a woman grafted to the god of the word
as if this is not miracle enough
these red and gold images stain
the wood of the icon etching the holy
made flesh the christ the child
is grateful at the breast
of the queen of heaven god
is overwhelmed with the sweet
goodness of she
who takes away the hurt
of his hunger his huge
eternal blood mother shrugging
away the painted halo
as she draws her child
to herself and allows
him to put away
the pain of the world