Foretokens | By Sarah Howe
'Unearthed in a clear-out, a picture calendar she’s kept – hoarding, I’ve learnt, is a mark of the emigrant – across continents and time.'
So begins Sarah Howe’s extraordinary new collection, returning to the riddle of belonging she explored in her award-winning debut, Loop of Jade. At the heart is her own mother’s clouded past: abandoned as a baby and taken in, at the turbulent dawn of Communist China, by a woman with her own hidden motives. Now a mother herself, Howe finds herself re-examining this unreliable narrative with fresh sight.
Sifting through her own history, the poet asks, how can a new generation transform a shattered inheritance? And what is lost and gained in the pursuit?
‘From the other side of ruin / we found safe passage’, Howe writes in these spectacular poems of emotional heft and quickening wit, their voice salvaged from the fragments of a former self.
Foretokens is a monumental work of survival and creation, turning over what is left behind as it strikes out towards astonishing new vistas.
Foretokens | By Sarah Howe
'Unearthed in a clear-out, a picture calendar she’s kept – hoarding, I’ve learnt, is a mark of the emigrant – across continents and time.'
So begins Sarah Howe’s extraordinary new collection, returning to the riddle of belonging she explored in her award-winning debut, Loop of Jade. At the heart is her own mother’s clouded past: abandoned as a baby and taken in, at the turbulent dawn of Communist China, by a woman with her own hidden motives. Now a mother herself, Howe finds herself re-examining this unreliable narrative with fresh sight.
Sifting through her own history, the poet asks, how can a new generation transform a shattered inheritance? And what is lost and gained in the pursuit?
‘From the other side of ruin / we found safe passage’, Howe writes in these spectacular poems of emotional heft and quickening wit, their voice salvaged from the fragments of a former self.
Foretokens is a monumental work of survival and creation, turning over what is left behind as it strikes out towards astonishing new vistas.
