Origin

JL Williams
Shearsman Books

Over the course of a career in Paediatrics, I have attended the births of hundreds, if not thousands, of babies. The long waits, ambiguity, the fears, the new uncanny love and blindsiding rush of conflicting feelings. It is that milieu, of new sensations and mixed emotions, that forms the subject matter for Scottish-American poet JL Williams’s fifth collection, Origin—along with the pandemic that envelops her child’s first twelve months on earth.

A risk for any poet, when communicating commonplaces like pregnancy, birth and parenthood, is a slide into mawkishness, rosy cliché, or their darker counterparts in the tales of blood-soaked sheets, bodily fluids, cracked bodies and demented sleepless nights that can be poetry workshop staples. But Williams transcends these tropes and renders her subject fresh, clear-eyed, relatable, human. This is a book for people about pregnancy and parenthood, not a book about pregnant people and parents.

Finding herself pregnant at forty-one, Williams wryly states in ‘I never wanted a child’, ‘Not for most of my life. I prefer dogs, animals generally.’ That poem then tenderly follows her journey from unhappy childhood babysitting of young siblings in an abusive home, through being a ‘childless mother’, to acceptance of her impending role as the parent she would like to be. She makes explicit acknowledgement, after a long struggle to conceive, of her persisting identities of child-free woman and child-less woman, and her continued defence of those who choose to be child-free.

The book exists in two sections. The first ‘Glimpse’ is shorter and structured as a chronology of the first two trimesters. Here the poems are stanzaic with a slant formality that mirrors the intricate, relentless progress of new life’s formation. Many begin with epigrams from other Edinburgh writers of Williams’s acquaintance. The language is simple in register, but with allusions to birds, the language of botany, plus Old Testament references that occasionally distract with their mystic abstruseness. That is but a slight criticism. The poems themselves draw in the reader with their voice, their love, and natural, dynamic rhythms.

The longer second section, ‘Mother Virus’, begins with baby’s arrival in the world (delightfully heralded by three birds: robin, wagtail and magpie). It progresses through the experience of new motherhood and watching a child grow and develop, versus the alienating, isolating counterpoint of the global pandemic. These poems are more open, more varied in form and subject matter: from exquisitely simple observation, ‘The Hand’, ‘What I’m trying to say is’, ‘Desire’; to complex explorations of a fearful new reality, ‘Wower’, ‘What Doesn’t Kill You’ and the core poem ‘Mother Virus’ itself. This sequence may have benefited from pruning certain poems that add minimally to its themes, or do not chime tonally with their neighbours— but fundamentally they don’t detract from what is a delicately-rendered celebration of human experience

—Colin Begg