Pelican Daughter

For El-Enany, the poem is an attempt to distil a thought or feeling, a sensory or affective response in Auden’s legacy. It is a way to neatly capture a look, a passing sting, and the complicated feelings emerging from the task of parenthood. [...] El-Enany’s Pelican Daughter is a lyrical meditation on planetary catastrophe and a new life born in among the annihilation of people across the world. She moves us beyond the passivity of witness, articulating a grief that works on the body and soul in tandem, driven by a comprehensible fury at the violations of life that capitalism enables.

-- Lola Olufemi * The Poetry Review *

The poetry of Nadine El-Enany has something of the primal power of the Mariner: you are grasped by the arm on a familiar street: you hadn’t seen anyone coming, you were getting through the day – now you’re alone with a clarity fierce and far-seeing, an austere compassion, a consoling light. Pelican Daughter carries the pulses of life, but sounds the charged spaces between them too. A brief poem about heartbreak seems to turn to a poem of distant war, then suddenly bombs are falling in earshot, new love is just around the corner, and a new life – the only hope if there’s only one – rises through the book like the dawning sun. The poems feel both timeless and time-stamped. This is poetry of the conscience, Thomas Hardy’s ‘full look at the Worst’, but it neither preaches nor berates, it simply guides the reader – often in remarkably few lines – to a place down the street where love seems reparable and peace might come. El-Enany’s is as compelling a new voice as one could hope to hear.

-- Glyn Maxwell

Pelican Daughter offers up a poetics of personal and political survival: intimate without being self-indulgent, urgent without sacrificing subtlety. Nadine El-Enany moves between the local and the geopolitical, the queer body and the besieged city, trauma and hope, refusing to rank one grief above another. This is a voice that tests the space between what language can carry and what it can only gesture towards. Alive to the fragility of bodies and what it means to mother, these poems sharpen our sense of what is at risk and what is worth protecting.

-- Jacob Sam-La Rose

Pelican Daughter traces the intimate geographies of motherhood and loss, witnessing them with remarkable and tender precision and attention to detail. The poems navigate landscapes of personal grief and collective trauma – the joy, love and loneliness of early motherhood and truths of the continuing atrocities of a world in turmoil. Nadine El-Enany writes with great care and remarkable honesty. A tremendous debut.

-- Vanessa Lam