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. 

Featured Poet: Helen Calcutt

Helen Calcutt's poetry and criticism has featured in publications including the Guardian, The Huffington Post, The Brooklyn Review, and Southbank Poetry. Her debut pamphlet Sudden rainfall was published by Perdika Press in 2014. It was a PBS Choice. Her full-length collection, Unable Mother, described as 'a violent and tender grapple with our cosy notions of motherhood' (Robert Peake) was published by V. Press in September 2018. It was re-created into a dance-theatre performance, and then into short film, by Redstorm Productions under the title Naked.

Helen was awarded a professional development grant from Arts Council England to write her second poetry collection A mountain that is your grief you can't utter in April 2019. She is creator and editor of acclaimed anthology, Eighty-Four (Verve Press, 2019), a book of verse on the subject of male suicide, grief, and hope. It was shortlisted for the Saboteur Awards 2019.  Helen is also successful dancer and choreographer, working with a specialism in the conversation between text and movement. She also works as a tutor and mentor for the likes of Poetry By Heart, Writing West Midlands, and The Poetry School, and is a visiting lecturer in Creative Writing at Loughborough University. Her website is: https://helencalcutt.org/

Below you can read a poem from her collection, Unable Mother. 

Crossing

This stable feels like a boat. Its roof rocks the hollow. 
There are windows on every side, concealed.  
Though it feels like a heart exposed, 
if hearts are water.
There are horses hanging like oars. 
The darkest pool touches their eyes, 
where their lives are suspended. 
My hands are trembling. 
I imagine they’re wings. That my mind could navigate 
the darkest crossing, 
if these crossings were waters, 
or a drowned field –

and by field, I mean
the resting place of my daughter. 
The animal world that keeps her, 
before I wake her.