Her Birth

'The pieces form a narrative sequence that are variously painful, jealous, hopeful, and tender ... This fine balancing act between emotional and cathartic resulted in the collection being nominated for the 2013 Forward Prize for Best Collection of Poetry. Yet beyond any industry accolades, Her Birth is all about feeling and the grace to accept and move on with life'
Susan Darlington, Spectrum Culture

In 2007 Rebecca Goss's newborn daughter, Ella, was diagnosed with Severe Ebstein's Anomaly. A rare and incurable heart condition. She lived for 16 months. Her Birth is a book-length sequence of poems beginning with Ella's birth, her short life and her death, and ending with the joys and complexities that come with the birth of another child. Goss navigates the difficult territory of grief and loss in poems that are spare, tender and haunting: 'Going home, back down / the river road, will be a foreign route without her'.
Category judge Michael Mackmin, Aylsham-based editor of poetry magazine The Rialto, said: 'I read the book from cover to cover in one go and couldn't keep back the tears. It's the story of the brief life of her first-born, who had an incurable heart disease. "I scoop her from her metal cot and rest / her broken heart on mine."'
'A raw story told with great clarity and one that eventually takes in the birth of a second child, who lives. Rebecca has terrific self-awareness too- watch out when you get to the poem 'Bench'.'
When Rebecca Goss's daughter, Ella, died aged just 16 months, Goss found herself speechless. Ella had been diagnosed at birth with Ebstein's anomaly- a rare condition in which the heart's tricuspid valve fails to form properly. The severity of her case meant there was no hope of treatment; the wonder was she clung to life for as long as she did. 'There were days', Goss wrote, in a recent blog post on the weeks after Ella's death, 'when I could not speak. One particular day, my husband and I went for a drive, in silence. Not the silence we had sometimes known before: both of us sulking, after a petty row. This was a dumbstruck silence. We were dumbstruck by what had happened to us'.
Ella died in 2008. Published five years later, Her Birth- shortlisted for the 2013 Forward prize- is Goss's attempt to master the silence; to bear witness to her daughter's small life, and to articulate the grief that overthrew her after her death. The poems themselves are brief, spare, honeycombed with blank spaces- lingering scraps of dead air- but taken together, they speak with extraordinary clarity. Goss is telling her daughter's story, here: the book opens with Ella's birth and then advances chronologically, with a forward momentum unusual in a poetry collection. Reading it, I found myself gripped.
The difficulty with a collection such as this is to consider it objectively; to separate subject from technique, and work out which you're responding to. Clearly, for Goss, this is essential poetry: one has the sense that she's writing for herself and for her daughter, rather than for an imagined, critical, reader. But Goss was a poet before her daughter's death, and even in the midst of heartbreak, her skill is evident. In 'Print', one of the finest poems in the collection, Goss takes an image of near-unbearable poignancy- Ella's 'prints. / Hands and feets, pencil grey, / as if they stood her in soot', handed to them by a nurse- and examines it with a judicious poet's eye; considering it for what it's not ('I wanted her handprint