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Leeds Beckett academic Emily Zobel Marshall publishes book of poetry with Peepal Tree Press
Bath of Herbs is a beautifully crafted, honest and thoughtful collection of poetry. It explores the complexity of mixed-race, hybrid identities and relationships to the English and Welsh mountains, fells, rivers and shorelines from an ‘othered’, unmappable, positionality.
The collection honours the lives of Black and Brown women and asks how they can reclaim space, both practically and conceptually. It celebrates and mourns the unspoken pain and joys of motherhood; of menstrual cycles, childbirth, tending to sick children with life-threatening illnesses, the death of mothers, love in all its myriad forms and the desire to escape the constraints of domestic and family life towards different kinds of freedoms. It also revisits the confusing world of childhood; the inexplicable actions of adults and the bullies who despise perceived difference.
There is her ownership too of a writerly inheritance handed down from her grandfather, the Black Martiniquan writer, Joseph Zobel, but also an awareness that this heritage has involved a movement away from the Black peasant world Zobel wrote about towards a comfortable Europeanness of being.
Other poems address the security of a middle-class life and the many pleasures it offers – but also how that world can be broken apart by death, illness, or the fear that the channels of communication have ‘gone down’ and how, as a woman expected to hold everything together, one is sometimes forced to take refuge in the deepest realms of the imagination.
Linking the whole is an engagement with the possibilities of healing: as in the bath of herbs in which her grandmother bathed her mother after giving birth; in the physicality of running and purificatory swimming in a river; in the care a hospital gives to her child and in the healing power of the natural world.
Trinidadian-British writer Monique Roffey says: “This debut collection comes from a woman who knows many things. It's immersed in nature and the natural world, its splendour and power to heal.
“This writer-poet-mother-daughter of the Caribbean knows motherhood and death and love. I found her poems to be so tender, exacting and precise I wanted to read them again and again and finished reading them not knowing which I liked best: the one about the moon cup menses shame and or the one about the calabash breasts or the one about being mixed race.”
Find out more about Bath of Herbs by Emily Zobel Marshall here.