All My Mad Mothers

By Jacqueline Saphra

Jacqueline Saphra's All My Mad Mothers explores love, sex and family relationships in vivacious, lush poems that span the decades and generations. At the heart of this collection of poems is the portrait of a mother as multitudes – as a magician with a bathroom of beauty tricks, as necromancer, as glamourous fire-starter, trapped in ever-decreasing circles and, above all else, almost impossible to grasp.

With an emphasis on the cultures of the different times, we tread a tantalising tightrope between the confessional and the invented. These astute poems step assuredly from childhood's first exposures to the scratched records and unsuitable lovers of young womanhood, the slammed doors of daughters and sons, the tears and salted soups of friendships, and the charms of late love. All the time, incandescent and luminous as an everlasting lightbulb, at the heart of each of Saphra's poems is a delicate filament kicking out a heavy-duty wattage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nine Arches Press
• Release date: May 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9781911027348

Jacqueline Saphra

Jacqueline Saphra is a poet, playwright, teacher and activist. She is the author of nine plays, five chapbooks and five poetry collections. The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions (flipped eye) was shortlisted for the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and If I Lay on my Back I Saw Nothing But Naked Women (The Emma Press) won Best Collaborative Work at The Sabotage Awards. Recent collections from Nine Arches Press are All My Mad Mothers (shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize), Dad, Remember You are Dead and One Hundred Lockdown Sonnets. Jacqueline is a founder member of Poets for the Planet and teaches at The Poetry School. Her latest collection, Velvel's Violin (Nine Arches Press, 2023) is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Book preview

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All My Mad Mothers

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All My Mad Mothers

Jacqueline Saphra

ISBN: 978-1-911027-20-1

Copyright © Jacqueline Saphra, 2017.

Cover artwork © detail from an untitled painting by Laurence Hope, photographed by Robin Saphra.

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, recorded or mechanical, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Jacqueline Saphra has asserted her right under Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

First published May 2017 by:

Nine Arches Press

PO Box 6269

Rugby

CV21 9NL

United Kingdom

www.ninearchespress.com

Printed in Britain by:

The Russell Press Ltd.

Nine Arches Press is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

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For my daughters

Contents

I

In the Winter of 1962 my mother

When I was a Child …

My Mother’s Bathroom Armoury

Eddie and the Pessaries

Sometimes my father fell asleep …

Sicily

My dark-haired mother was a necromancer …

The Sound of Music

My Australian stepfather stretched his own canvasses …

All My Mad Mothers

II

Crete, 1980

My first stepmother was blonde and clever …

Getting into Trouble

Things We Can’t Untie

Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle

Sometimes paint spilled and leaked …

Virginity

The Day My Cousin took me to the Musée Rodin

Volunteers, 1978

Hampstead, 1979

My mother shrank to the size of a small potted plant …

My Friend Juliet’s Icelandic Lover

Mile End

III

The World’s Houses

Chicken

My children were pierced and decorated …

Mother. Son. Sack of Salt.

Sometimes home was too close too the edge …

Leavings

When I think of you

What Time is it in Nova Scotia?

On certain occasions I juggled …

The Melting

The Doors to My Daughter’s House

The shop assistant observed …

IV

Reincarnation

The desk is an heirloom …

Cimex Lectularius

Kiss/Kiss

My father’s final wife had hair like my mother’s …

The Anchor

My lover was a celebrated poet …

Spunk

Soup

Everlasting

Since We Last Met

Late at night my mother …

Valentine for Turbulent Times

Charm for Late Love

Acknowledgements

About the Author & this book

I

In the winter of