Julia Webb is delivering a masterclass in poetry to the Gorleston Rural Writes group and she is hoping to tease some autobiographical poetry out of the women. The workshop is generously supported by the Norfolk Arts Project Fund and will be held in Gorleston Library, another partner in the community writing project. Julia is an experienced tutor, her latest collection reviewed below, is a beautifully moving and complex series of revelations.
Bird Sisters is a quest to understand the tangle of family and especially the river of a relationship that runs between siblings. It is a brave book, a tense, personal evocation of life in a family overshadowed by the rule of a ‘Sun Father’, and his punitive severity blighting the lives of the children – and the shadowy orbit of ‘Moon Mother.’ Webb conjures childhood memories into enchanted, surreal motifs that fuse with the authentic detail of the everyday. We are carried through the universe, only to land in a snatched sexual encounter outside the chicken abattoir, which twists into a mythical transformation.
To me, as a reader, I found the prose poems, the accounts of things that happened at home, compelling, like The Piano Lesson – (refused by Daddy), Lent and Rain. This is a world of slights, longings and cruelties, darkness and difficulty, spiky, complex relationships, and acts, however small, of a rebellion and resilience. There are wonderful images, ‘Her mother darns the window.’ - ‘Like a baby dandled on the knee of the sea.’ And lines that completely twine the natural world, the local, regional, recognizable world into the being of the characters that populate this collection – ‘you send your snaggle fingers down/into Breckland’s thin soil/snare rabbits in the net of your tresses.’ (From the Same Cloth).
This is an intriguing book, myth and miasma, real and sobering, as if the writer is still puzzling it all out. A great read.
Bird Sisters, Julia Webb, Nine Arches Press, 2016.
Belona Greenwood
Words and Women
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