This is the story of a baby coming into the world, and of her first year in that world altered beyond recognition by a virus born into our lives at nearly the same time. It is a song of breath, and of light. It is a collection of love poems, and a cry flung into the universe echoing the cry of all babies, a cry of loss and of nearly unbearable love. It is a book not just for pregnant women, or new mums and dads, but for all people who have entered through that small crack into the light of this life, and for all who have parents and have grappled with the joys and challenges of those most intimate of relationships. It is a song of light, and of breath. It is a story of where we come from.
Reviews
Lucy Sheerman in Long Poem Magazine
Available from Shearsman Books
I came to Arran with a copy of Origin and am writing to say how much I admired it and was moved by it. Everything comes in its time and I felt an affinity with Origin as I too became a parent at 40 and found equivalences in my own experiences. I’d never felt the world (of the pregnancy) so intimate nor the larger world so threatening. The intimacy you capture in Origin of the wonder growing in you and of your own body is thrilling to read.
Tom Pow
I loved the way all the differing sensations found their forms in Origin – from the nakedly honest memoir to the lilt of folk tales and folk memory.
There is a bonus to readers of the work that you had acquired the technical skills and the emotional acuity to express and to give praise to the great mystery. Here, you have fully acknowledged love and an ecstatic and grateful joy.
This collection not only exalts, is frightened for, and treasures new motherhood, but allows for its complexities and the terrible potential for loss, and especially I like how it doesn’t amputate mother-love from just the way we love as humans, sensuously and sometimes messily. It never slips into ‘saintly mother’ territory – it seems to recognise the burden that particular role has placed on women – for those who chose to have kids and those who didn’t.
Lynn Davidson
Trippy. Utterly relatable. Moving AF. Every new mum should get a copy on prescription.
Llinos Jones
JL Williams Poetry 