Rachel Spence, "Daughter of the Sun"

Rachel Spence lives in London, Ludlow and Venice. Her poems explore themes including time, absence, motherhood and water. She has published three pamphlets: Furies (Templar, 2016), Call & Response (Emma Press, 2020), and Uncalendared (Coast to Coast to Coast Journal Winner, 2023). Her debut collection Bird of Sorrow (Templar, 2018) was highly commended in the 2019 Forward Prize. Her prose poem "Venice Unclocked," in collaboration with photographer Giacomo Cosua, was published by Ivory Press in 2022. Her poetry has appeared widely, including in PN Review, The North, The London Magazine, 14 Magazine and Tears in the Fence. Her non-fiction book Battle for the Museum, which explores the relationship between art, power and money, was published by Hurst in 2024.

About Daughter of the Sun, by Rachel Spence
From the gentle rivers of Shropshire to the heat-baked seas of Greece, Daughter of the Sun radiates with mothers and tracks our orbits around them.

Split into two parts, a sonnet sequence recounts Spence’s time reconnecting with her estranged mother – caring for her through illness and grieving her passing – before a bold rewriting of the myths around Medea reimagines her not as a murderous witch but a child-free scientist ahead of her time.

With the power and salve of the natural world always close by, Daughter of the Sun contends with being a mother and a daughter, and also what it means to liberate ourselves of those identities and write our own myths full of freedom and possibility.

You can read more about Daughter of the Sun on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a sample poem from the collection. 

From Daughter of the Sun

July 1976, your garden, midnightish.

Our worlds distilled to nothing save each other 

and this bewildering heat. I hear you

padding down the stairs – morphine trickle

of a mother’s footsteps – beg you to let me

stay while you find whisky, deckchairs.

The lawn is dry as a ship’s biscuit, but we are 

watered by the scent of your tobacco plants. 

My winter’s bone is being old enough to know 

I don’t know what you’re thinking. Not even 

when the owls come. Two, maybe three,

their beatless wings spellbound against

earth’s pull. Ten seconds we’ll remember

all our lives. We know it, even then.