When I first read the title of this book, I was unsure what to expect. To my delight I discovered a collection of quite beautiful and extremely emotive poems. To analyse any would be to completely spoil the intense feeling that I had when I read them. Frequently I find poetry collections from a single poet rather disappointing as I will only engage with a few of them. Here, however, I found myself drawn in by the subject matter and beautifully evocative language of each individual poem. This is a book that I should like to own and to read and reread. I welcome the experience of discovering it.
When I Think of My Body as a Horse centres around the experience of infertility and baby loss with a wider focus on body ownership and motherhood. The poems follow a totemic animal theme rooted in nature through which the poet explores her own experience of the loss of her daughter, an IVF baby, during an emergency c-section in 2010. The poems in When I Think of My Body as a Horse are about trauma, but they are also about recovery and the powerful, animal instincts that surround the act of creating a family, and how this is absorbed and accepted as part of a wider narrative when there is no 'rainbow baby' to add closure to the trauma of loss.
