Girl ~ Rebecca Goss - Poet

The Certificates

Mothers were not given space to write their occupations on UK
birth certificates until 1984. Source : General Register Office

The registrar takes his pen, tips its freight
of permanent ink to write Poet in the space
that did not exist beside my mother's name.

or my grandmother's name. Those bloody
sweat-drenched women sent back to hearth
and cradle, their skills cancelled, never known...

 

I have been reading Rebecca Goss's new collection Girl, (following on from the post about Her Birth earlier in the week) is from the cover information...

'In Girl, Rebecca Goss considers the emotional and physical connections women make to the world around them. The poems interrogate and celebrate female identity and experience, and the dynamics of family and friendship. From a woman struck by lightning to a baby who understands shadows, Goss navigates the real and the imagined with equal flair. At the heart of the collection is a distinctive, sensual series of poems responding to the work of the artist Alison Watt: the result is a fearless exploration of the female body and female desire. '

The collection is still very new to me and it will be a while before I can absorb it, but I'm sensing that affinity with a poet who has already made an impression. I'm thinking how new collections from the likes of Jean Sprackland and Alice Oswald quickly make their mark. The range and scope of Girl still feels vast and untamed to me at the moment, still unfamiliar as do all new collections, but poems are starting to impress and stay with me just as Her Birth did.

If you have ever had pleurisy then reading the series on pleurisy might resonate. Pleurisy 1 reminded me quite how awful it was...

At its most acute
she pictured an orb

phosphorescent
in a snare of a rib.

It eased to the pressure 
of a handstand,

executed
by someone fully grown

on her chest
and every cough

discharged small bombs
across her back....

I succumbed to pleurisy out of nowhere one fine day in August back in 1986 standing in a friend's kitchen. One breath fine, the next agony. I eventually went to the doctor with my 'pulled muscle' and emerged with antibiotics the size of torpedoes and had to set a timer to make myself cough every thirty minutes because it was so painful. I'd been walking round with three small children and pneumonia and had no idea, because aren't you always a bit tired and under the weather with three of them under school age. The pain, those 'small bombs' across the back, lasted for months. Rebecca Goss describes it all in five exquisite poems spaced throughout the collection.

And then that poem The Certificates I have quoted at the beginning...

My mother had four children in a decade,
each certificate proving nothing but birth.
My lineage? Patriarchal : father/farmer...

I don't want to spoil it because there is a delicious twist in the next few lines, but had I ever noticed that only one of our children's birth certificates has my occupation written in. The one born in 1985...

We keep the full copies here. I dig them all out to check and I am utterly astonished.

Did I think to consider it an injustice at the time.

These are definitely poems to make me think.