My friend Jenny Hope gave me this book as a present and I have really enjoyed reading it. I keep going back to it because there are so many vivid characters that I don't tire of reading about them. The quality of Helen Kitson's writing is excellent, she touches upon every aspect of the human condition; grief, love, passion, bitterness, regret and hope and each poem feels authentic, like this is what these people really felt and thought. This is due to the poet's skill. She invented these poems from photographs and snippets of family history. I can really visualise these people and shared their emotions as I read the well crafted poems. The poems about illegitimate children are especially poignant.
Here Helen writes about the collection...
'Sometimes it was a name that sparked an idea for a new poem. Amongst the many Johns and Williams, Marys and Annes, there was the occasional unusual name. One of my favourites is Mellonia Blakeway, b.1784 in the Church Stretton area. I wondered who had decided to give her such a pretty first name. Where had it originated? I learnt that Mellonia was the Roman goddess of bees. Was my Mellonia’s father perhaps a beekeeper? At any rate, the name inspired one of my most joy-filled poems, informed by my own childhood love for Church Stretton –
The sky is pure heaven, blue and gold.
On her tongue, the taste of honey, rich and smooth.
Perhaps I romanticise. My ancestors’ lives were tough, no doubt about it, and many of them couldn't write their own names, let alone read poetry. However historically inaccurate these poems are, through them I have come to love these people. I am proud to be one of them, which is why I called the sequence of poems ‘Ancestor Worship’. Worship is perhaps not quite the right word, though. Respect is nearer the mark. I take my hat off to them, these very ordinary people: my ancestors, my kin.' read more here...
NO PLACE LIKE HOME
It will be the only surviving photo.
He took her to America and gave her a wooden house,
A burning desert, and his family.
His eyes are intense and glassy,
His prophet's beard hiding most of his face.
Next to him, she scowls.
His hand rests heavily on her leg.
Neither of them wants this touch
But, like others, it seems necessary.
At times she wonders why she came.
She misses autumn, and her mother's cooking.
Marriage is big enough, without all this.
The photograph was her idea,
Something to send back home.
Your home is here, he tells her, missing the point.
His clumsy hand kills her smile.
She won't send the photo, he knows it,
He must have all of her.
They will have ten children
And know nothing but poverty.
Each child American, another heart tie.
Even if she could have seen the future
There was nowhere for her to run.
Endless desert, endless country, roadmaps gone.
She puts the photo with letters that smell of home.
She avoids herself in the mirror,
Refuses to acknowledge the distance, the sea between.
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