For my daughters
Contents
Introduction
‘My roots spread’ – Roots and Growing Up
Diaspora
Sue Hardy-Dawson
To Make a Homeland
Amineh Abou Kerech
Metaphors
Sylvia Plath
Milk-Jug Jackers
Hollie McNish
A Glasgow Nonsense Rhyme for Molly
Liz Lochhead
Ode on the Whole Duty of Parents
Frances Cornford
When I Was a Bird
Katherine Mansfield
School Parted Us
George Eliot
Timetable
Kate Clanchy
A Glass of Tea
Shukria Rezaei
How to Cut a Pomegranate
Imtiaz Dharker
Bridge
Aisha Borja
I Am My Own Parent
Deborah Alma
Huge Blue
Pippa Little
Song
Lady Dorothea Du Bois
To My Daughter On Being Separated from Her on Her Marriage
Anne Hunter
Flight Radar
Imtiaz Dharker
Heirloom
Kathleen Raine
Mali
Gillian Clarke
The Pale Horse
Lesley Ingram
On Forgetting That I Am a Tree
Ruth Awolola
‘We’ve had a whirl and a blast, girl’ – Friendship
5th Dudley Girl Guides
Liz Berry
Thirteen
Kate Tempest
Lacing Boots
Helen Burke
Witch
Jean Tepperman
Polly
Rhian Edwards
To D. R.
Laura Grey
To Mrs K., On Her Sending Me an English Christmas Plum-Cake at Paris
Helen Maria Williams
Friendship
Elizabeth Jennings
from Essay on Friendship
Mary Leapor
Friends
Polly Clark
from The Bas Bleu
Hannah More
Introductions
Moya Cannon
When Last We Parted
Catherine Maria Fanshawe
Long Departure
Sappho
Fiere
Jackie Kay
‘My heart has made its mind up’ – Love
Phosphorescence
Victoria Gatehouse
Practice
Mary Jean Chan
A Pride of Ladies
Anne Halley
Siren Song
Margaret Atwood
Valentine
Carol Ann Duffy
A Moment
Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
In an Artist’s Studio
Christina Rossetti
The Lust of the Eyes
Elizabeth Siddal
The Guitarist Tunes Up
Frances Cornford
Before the sun goes down
Astrid Hjertenaes Andersen
Translated by Nadia Christensen
Sonnet 43
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
A Birthday
Christina Rossetti
The Sun Has Burst the Sky
The house was just twinkling in the moon light
Gertrude Stein
Reconciliation
Else Lasker-Schüler
Translated by James Sheard
Camomile Tea
Katherine Mansfield
To my Dear and Loving Husband
Anne Bradstreet
A Decade
Amy Lowell
Wedding
Alice Oswald
Anniversary
Elaine Feinstein
Song for the Last Act
Louise Bogan
Kissing
Fleur Adcock
Renouncement
Alice Meynell
Among His Books
Edith Nesbit
Why?
Mary Webb
Love Comes Back
Hera Lindsay Bird
heat
Yrsa Daley-Ward
One Art
Elizabeth Bishop
Dead Love
Elizabeth Siddal
Let It Be Forgotten
Sara Teasdale
‘Star-high, heart-deep’ – Nature
The Awakening River
Katherine Mansfield
High Waving Heather
Emily Brontë
Address to a Child During a Boisterous Winter Evening
Dorothy Wordsworth
Lines Composed in a Wood on a Windy Day
Anne Brontë
Breakage
Mary Oliver
The Trees’ Counselling
Christina Rossetti
The Unseen Life of Trees
Chrissie Gittins
Green Rain
Mary Webb
from Aurora Leigh
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
For Forest
Grace Nichols
Sylhet
Rukiya Khatun
How to knit a sheep
Di Slaney
Nerval and the Lobster
Katharine Towers
Nan Hardwicke Turns Into a Hare
Wendy Pratt
Of Many Worlds in This World
Margaret Cavendish
Power of the Other
Francesca Beard
Friday Afternoon
Alison Brackenbury
Speak of the North!
Charlotte Brontë
A Memory
Lola Ridge
Wind and Silver
Amy Lowell
from The Land
Vita Sackville-West
Twinkled to Sleep
Ursula Bethell
‘I’m glad I exist’ – Freedom, Mindfulness and Joy
It Is Everywhere
Remi Graves
On Foot I Wandered Through the Solar Systems
Edith Södergran
Translated by Malena Mörling and Jonas Ellerström
The Orange
Wendy Cope
New Every Morning
Susan Coolidge
If Once You Have Slept on an Island
Rachel Field
Full Moon
Vita Sackville-West
Seven Times One: Exultation
Jean Ingelow
Today
Jean Little
Freedom
Olive Runner
To Sleep, Possum to Dream
Vahni Capildeo
Submerged
Lola Ridge
The Moon in Your Hands
H.D.
You Who Want
Hadewijch of Antwerp
Boats in the Bay
Winifred Holtby
Three Good Things
Jan Dean
There Is No Frigate Like a Book
Emily Dickinson
This Poem . . .
Elma Mitchell
Uppity
Eileen Myles
Stanzas
Emily Brontë
Antidote to the Fear of Death
Rebecca Elson
‘Phenomenal woman’ – Society, Fashion and Body Image
Phenomenal Woman
Maya Angelou
Lullaby
Dorothy Parker
To a Proud Beauty
‘Ephelia’
A Scherzo: A Shy Person’s Wishes
Dora Greenwell
Mirror
Sylvia Plath
A Poet Advises
a Change of Clothes
Anna Wickham
Tough Dragons
Selina Nwulu
Homage to My Hips
Lucille Clifton
My Body
Abigail Cook
And then he said: When did your arms get so big?
Kristina Close
Poem in Which My Legs Are Accepted
Kathleen Fraser
Not Andromeda
Katie Byford
‘But still, like air, I rise’ – Courage, Protest and Resistance
‘Hope’ is the Thing with Feathers
Emily Dickinson
The New Colossus
Emma Lazarus
Ain’t I a Woman?
Sojourner Truth
Protest
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Eliza Harris
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
Rosa Parks
Jan Dean
My First Day at School
Michaela Morgan
Wanted A Husband
Marion Bernstein
To the Ladies
Lady Mary Chudleigh
The Battle of the Sexes
Liz Brownlee
Still I Rise
Maya Angelou
Saltwater
Finn Butler
The Call
Charlotte Mew
Before I Leave the Stage
Alice Walker
The Juniper Tree
Vittoria Colonna
Ruth
Pauli Murray
Inventory
Dorothy Parker
93 Percent Stardust
Nikita Gill
God Says Yes To Me
Kaylin Haught
Warning
Jenny Joseph
May 1915
Charlotte Mew
Immensity
Mabel Esther Allan
The Brits
Colette Bryce
There Will Come Soft Rains
Sara Teasdale
‘Behind Me – dips Eternity’ – Endings
Remember
Christina Rossetti
Not Waving but Drowning
Stevie Smith
The Child in Me
May Riley Smith
September Rain
Helen Dunmore
Woodland Burial
Pam Ayres
The Things That Matter
Edith Nesbit
Behind Me – dips Eternity
Emily Dickinson
About the Poets
Index of First Lines
Index of Poets
Acknowledgements
Introduction
It’s an exciting time for poetry. Slams and performances are attracting huge audiences; book sales are booming; some of today’s biggest online superstars are poets. Women are at the forefront of this movement: winning prizes, headlining festivals, topping bestseller lists and connecting with thousands of readers in digital spaces. It has not always been so.
Anthologies have traditionally been dominated by male voices, seasoned with a mere scattering of women – usually, the same few names. And yet women – wondered at and worshipped by male poets – danced through and dominated those pages. It puzzled me, so I started reading.
Women’s songs have always formed a part of oral traditions, though these were often not recorded. Female poets were active in the ancient world but, for the most part, their work was not preserved and some – like Sappho’s – was edited or suppressed later. Throughout history and into our own times, women have faced educational, religious and social limitations on their freedom both to write and – especially – to publish. During most eras, it was almost exclusively aristocratic women who had the leisure, learning and liberty to become known as poets.
For centuries it was considered shocking for women to lift their eyes from the housework and seek employment outside the home, and especially for them to trespass in the ‘male’ arena of literature. Women writers were condemned, or mocked. Parents worried in case potential husbands were put off by their bookish daughters. It has been hard for women – especially if they are also mothers – to find time to work, and to get that work taken seriously. We will never know how many women wrote but didn’t dare publish, or exactly how many published under pseudonyms (often men’s names), as George Eliot and the Brontë sisters felt that they must.
It was often felt that women should stick to certain subjects – family, friendship, dutiful religion and the prettier corners of nature – and they have written beautifully and powerfully about all these. However, in the poems gathered here and elsewhere, female poets consider every possible subject: science and our magnificent universe; politics and protest; bodies and belief; myths and mental health; war and displacement.
I have included brief biographies of the poets – and what women they were, and are! From suffragettes and freed slaves to schoolgirls, I was fascinated to uncover their stories, many of which were new to me and will, I think, be new to you. Some of these women faced poverty, war, physical and mental illness, oppressive societies and cruelty, but they spun from their experiences wonderful poetry that will speak to readers for generations to come.
Poetry is personal, so any anthology must carry a sincere apology for omissions. I have never found the process of whittling down a longlist more agonizing – there were hundreds of poems loved and lost in the process. I hope you will find in this book a diverse but representative choir of voices – many of which have been unheard for too long – and there will be something unfamiliar and intriguing for every reader. I wish you as much joy reading it as I had compiling it.
Ana Sampson
‘My roots spread’ – Roots and Growing Up
Here are poems about where – and who – we come from. In some of these verses, the poets explore the notion of home, tracing their own deep roots, and the experience of displacement when those roots are torn up. Others conjure up childhood, from the smell of school to the giddiness of garden games.
Here are sisters: a little Katherine Mansfield fluttering fantasy feathers, and George Eliot movingly mourning her brother’s affection after twenty sad years of silence between them. Here are mothers: Sylvia Plath pregnant with promises that must now be kept; Hollie McNish spinning stories about her mysterious baby’s midnight adventures; Frances Cornford banishing bedtime terrors. We see them bidding that first farewell at the school gate or the others that come later, when their children fly the nest. And here, too, are daughters: unravelling their futures with a flourish, or sifting the treasures handed down to them by the generations of women that came before.
Diaspora
My roots spread tap and spur from Portugal
the slap, of turquoise seas, on distant sands.
Stems of mine came from ice to Africa
later – to boast a son of Abraham.
I am fertile seed, carried from Ireland
emeralds rich with peat and blue mountain mists.
I am black-work under pomegranate suns
the tale, of a princess of Spain, no less.
Red branches – an envelope, from a new
Chinese uncle. I am a paper dragon
dance, animal years that blossom haiku.
Grown from Gaul leaves, Roman petals sprout words,
Pict, Viking, Saxon, Norman, conquered
with prayer or sword. I am Indian spices
a Maharaja wearing a silk peacock
I am chi, pashmina and pyjamas.
I am every woman, man and small child
in every mirror – puzzles of ancestry
we who call ourselves British, yet as I
sometime migrants invaders refugees.
Sue Hardy-Dawson
To Make a Homeland
Can anyone teach me
how to make a homeland?
Heartfelt thanks if you can,
heartiest thanks,
from the house-sparrows,
the apple-trees of Sy
ria,
and yours very sincerely.
Amineh Abou Kerech
Metaphors
I’m a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.
Money’s new-minted in this fat purse.
I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I’ve eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there’s no getting off.
Sylvia Plath
Milk-Jug Jackers
Baby you look tired, where have you been?
My baby girl smiles gummy and looks up at me.
She says, ‘Mummy every morning between midnight and three
We go milk-jug-jacking all my babies and me.
We meet in secret on the green just outside the flats
The babies, bunnies, birds and the cats
We sit on bunnies’ backs, galloping, and follow the birds
The cats’ eyes light the path of the outside world.
To the big park lakes is where we run
Where, waiting by the piers, are our friendly swans.
We jump off bunnies’ backs to the white swans’ wings
Sit amongst the feathers where we whisper and sing:
“We are the milk-jug jackers and we’re coming your way
Ladies better watch out, put your nipples away
We’ve got our crowbars at the ready to snap off your straps
Happy slapper milk-jug jackers, hope you’re ready for that.”
With our animal friends and our bunny-rabbit cars
We sit, snapping bras, in our milk-jug bars
Till our potbellies are full of white baby rum
Then the swans fly us home for our feed time with Mum
Sipping on your nipple I giggle in delight
Cos you don’t know I’ve been drinking milk in all the night.
Sipping on your nipple I giggle in delight
Cos you don’t know I’ve been milk-jug-jacking all of the night.’
Hollie McNish
A Glasgow Nonsense Rhyme for Molly
Molly Pin Li McLaren,
come home and look
at the pictures in your brand-new book –
a tree, a bird, a fish, a bell,
a bell, a fish, a tree, a bird.
Point, wee Molly, and say the word!
Oh, Molly, I wish
you the moon as white and round as a dish
and a bell, a tree, a bird and a fish.
Touch! Taste! Look! Smell!
(tree, fish, bird, bell)
And listen, wee Molly, listen well
to the wind,
to the wind in the tree go swish