Under English law a parent still has the right to disinherit their offspring. This book is a poet’s response to being written out of her mother’s will. Exploring dispossession in a range of forms – from colonial legacies in Scotland and Australia to contemporary impacts of industrial civilisation on human health, planetary systems, and our children’s future – The Mother Country is simultaneously a journey through sorrow, a quest for poetic justice, and a movement towards forgiveness and ecological restoration.
Cover image by Marian Bruce.
The Mother Country
POETRY / ENVIRONMENT
‘She makes us see, hear and experience not only the grief of things across the planet but also the memories of the damaged and vanished worlds from which it rises … Perhaps in these perilous transitional times we are all disinherited now, and Moore’s poems perform an important duty by making us feel the pathos and the righteous rage of that condition.’
Lindsay Clarke
‘I love the vastness of Helen Moore’s vision and the unflinching way she puts it into the world … But Moore’s Blakean vision, tackling the toxic tyrannies of our own times, is always tempered by minute details which convey her deep love for what is under threat.’
Rosie Jackson
‘In these verbally dextrous, deeply rooted poems, Helen Moore demonstrates the truth of her quotation from Blake: “A tear is an intellectual thing.” … If our world is to awaken to its own danger, it will need ecopoets such as Moore.’
D.M. Black
'But ultimately, it is Moore's ecopoetry and, specifically, our divisibility from Nature, which offers hope ... From pain comes knowledge, realisation, redemption, and it is a strong voice here that shares those insights.'
Dawn Gorman
'The poems are ... sometimes angry or impatient, or tender with hope; and always rich with observation and knowledge ... Helen Moore's poetry is characterised by formal versatility, intellectual energy, and political daring - an inspiration for what poetry can offer in the face of our urgent global challenges.'
Kay Syrad
'Her command of language is startling - the satire, imagery, syntax, surprise twists and juxtapositions, the beauty of word choices, the level and depth of historical research and the author’s processing powers, the astonishing analogies she draws, the personal soul-baring bravery.'
Anne Casey