Elaine Randell - Böcker

All of Elaine Randell's earlier books are now out of print, and this volume serves to give an overview of her entire career, from 1970 to today, covering her early lyric poems to pastorals and to searing documentary poems, often in a speaking voice, that are drawn from her professional life, where, as a social worker, she deals with children at risk.

"Faulty Mothering" is based on my work with families but focusing on mothers in particular who are experiencing problems in attachment to their children. A backdrop to such difficulties maybe poverty, mental-health problems, substance misuse, adoption, fostering, domestic violence or being poorly parented themselves. I am interested in the capacity of people to change and in the courage of children and young people who adapt and survive adversity. The poems explore those issues. The 'Song Cycles', which make up the rest of the book, come from a call and response, using sentences sometimes written by others in novels which have resonated for me.

'Elaine Randell's writing was jump-started early by the outpouring of experimental small-press poetry and publishing that accompanied the emergence of pop art. That movement drew attention to the art-life divide by reducing it to a sharp but casual edginess. The poetry associated with this moment adopted informal means to freshen its reader relations across the same frontier. Randell's subsequent career in social work and psychotherapy has found her firmly on the side of life. The poems in The Meaning of Things, though making no such claims for their acts, are alive with the clear feeling, ethical tact, and rhythmical skill required to move rapidly back and forth along that borderline.' -Peter Robinson