Milk Fever is a prize-winning first collection from a new voice in contemporary British poetry. The poet’s former career as a television scriptwriter for young adults is evident in the fresh, unguarded and intimate address that moves seamlessly between tenderness and brutality in poems largely concerning experiences of motherhood: the joy, the passion and the delight of this unique mother-child dyad paired with shadowy twins – terror, despair and rage. The poems are urgent and sensual, even when mothers are not human beings: an eagle, a copper mine and a windmill are all given a maternal voice in a collection which searches the world for reunion with a lost other; a lost mother perhaps, or as in the Persephone and Demeter myth, a lost daughter. The poems travel through Chile, Italy, Russia, ancient Greece, Argentina and France in an attempt to explore the timeless and universal relationship, or variants of it, we all have with our mothers, the relationship that is the blueprint for all our future relationships. This is a collection for, against and about mother, for all that she is and everything we try to pretend she isn’t.
