Gazebo Books (2023)
Reviewed by Vanessa Page for StylusLit
Poetry is an effortless vessel for the experience of first-time motherhood. In reading this collection – Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon’s second – I was reminded immediately of Eleanor Jackson’s fine collection ‘Gravidity and Parity’.
Birthing, parenting, and raising and losing children are things that punctuate our lifetimes and writing about them is a rite of passage for many female poets. And in this book, the poet shows us this, and much more, laying before us the often bruised, bloodied and unseen truths of the female experience.
There’s an acute sense of overwhelm that comes with motherhood that poetry seems purpose-built for. It is art than can be slipped quietly into a small moment inside the busyness. Single poems can be formed in these pockets of time, like precious threads reminding us that we are writers, and we are whole – not simply a response system for a small human’s demands.
Damjanovich-Napoleon has artfully mapped motherhood from conception to birth and beyond through powerful poems that lead the reader through this exhausting, beautiful and at times desperate dance.
While moments of light and love shine throughout this collection – it’s in the darker moments that the work has its deepest resonance.
Today, more than ever before, the reproductive issues of women are in clear focus. Workplaces are introducing reproductive leave, the nation’s cohort of Generation X women (particularly) are speaking up about the impacts of perimenopause and menopause and we are sharing our stories of grief and trauma more freely.
This collection pulses inside this context, laying bare the experience of motherhood with skill, sensitivity and wisdom. The beautiful and the brutal both take centre stage, creating the book’s most important moments.
We open on a transition poem, where we encounter a battle of wills between the woman, the writer and the unpredictable chaos that comes with motherhood. A clever portrait with disciplined mantras scaffolding the lines like ribs as the struggle for control unfolds – until finally, just trying becomes enough. It’s all any one of us can successfully aim for at this particular juncture. Welcome to motherhood.
That decisions will never solely be hers again to make is evident in the poems that follow, where the most important decisions are hers alone. Because of course, when we become mothers, our hands become forced. We are no longer just deciding for ourselves, but also for the small human we’ve become responsible for.
Domestic poems about the small moments of a mother’s experience shine brightly in the book’s opening section. In ‘The contents of my son’s pockets on wash day’ we discover an entirely relatable found poem that could have been written in the laundry of any mother. In ‘On dropping my favorite tea cup after five hours broken sleep’ we identify with the vulnerability a first-time mother feels. In ‘Conjunction’ we encounter simple milestones that on the surface might seem insignificant, but which in fact act as tiny bridges to loss as a child develops their independence.
However, the best moments are contained in a clutch of poems that lay in the middle of the collection. In ‘Phantom Pregnancy’ a hope is powerfully imagined, manifesting as a uterine ‘dot dot dot, dash, dash, dash, dot dot dot.’ In ‘Heartbeat’ the poet explores the topic of abortion, describing the thin line between self and morality women are often forced to walk as the ‘vessels for the mistakes and laws of men’. In ‘Endometriosis is not a metaphor (a sestina)’, this historically misunderstood condition is described as ‘a prisoner with a shank in hand’ and ‘jellyfish stingers’ and ‘unmanageable blood’. In ‘When the plum tree fruits, I think of you’, a remembrance of a miscarriage is unpicked, through the bloodied images of plum fruits which bookend the poem.
Damjanovich-Napoleon is a force at these depths.
In the poem ‘The night is more’, she exclaims ‘My God! What a terrible and beautiful place this world is!’ and in this collection, the poet has brought us this beauty and terror with great skill, through visceral poems that show us both suffering and tenderness.
Good poetry is about making the reader feel and connect to something in their own experience – to invite re-reading. While many forms of poetry are clever or academic – powerful poetry invites the reader to feel something. This is subjective of course, and I’ll never apologise for flicking over erasure and other experimental forms in search of work that connects, triggers or sounds in my mind like a bell, long after the page is turned.
‘If there is a butterfly that drinks tears’ is a strong collection and in it, Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon’s voice rings out with relatability, warmth and honesty.