“Spence takes the messy complexities of grief, love, mothers, daughters and myth and somehow manages to hold it all still – just long enough for us to get a good look. Utterly readable and gorgeously crafted – each poem has a wild beating heart and a steady hand.” – Ella Frears
Daughter of the Sun is a collection of poems by Rachel Spence. Cover by Emma Dai’an Wright.
‘Saltmarsh days, unwatered.
Struggling to find the poem in the morning,
the garden waking to the creak and clink
of shutters, my neighbour’s taut croon
to her toddler. Had forgotten how May
clogs Venice with the scent of jasmine
how a baby’s cry is more cat than human.
This time last year we didn’t know you had
just weeks to live. Sat in your garden
watching the hen pigeon plunge over
and over into your solarnum unless
her chicks were yelping out her absence.
John Cage found music in the dust of silence.
My sonnet in your body dissolving into blue.’
From the gentle rivers of Shropshire to the heat-baked seas of Greece, Daughter of the Sun radiates with mothers and tracks our orbits around them.
Split into two parts, a sonnet sequence recounts Spence’s time reconnecting with her estranged mother – caring for her through illness and grieving her passing – before a bold rewriting of the myths around Medea reimagines her not as a murderous witch but a child-free scientist ahead of her time.
With the power and salve of the natural world always close by, Daughter of the Sun contends with being a mother and a daughter, and also what it means to liberate ourselves of those identities and write our own myths full of freedom and possibility.
