Eloquent and uncompromising, Swell explores the triumphs and hardships of the journey to new motherhood – through pregnancy, miscarriage, birth and beyond
In the consultation room I stared
at the purple flowers in their purple
vase and imagined my insides:
an ocean, a cave, a storm.
Maria Ferguson’s second poetry collection is a raw and powerful documentation of one woman’s experience of becoming a mother. Against a backdrop of the sounds and sensations of daily life, she longs for her own mother's embrace, observes as her body changes and charts a course through loss and wilting house plants towards recovery, empowerment and renewal.
Tender, direct and winningly witty, Swell distils the poet's complex feelings surrounding family and domesticity, exploring the contending weight and levity felt as she contemplates a thrillingly unfamiliar new chapter. Ferguson is a poet as alert to the absurd as to the shattering, and these are large-hearted poems, full of life and thought. Together, they invite the reader to join them in a search for self-acceptance, for freedom from shame and for a path to stability in increasingly uncertain times.
About the Author
Maria Ferguson is a writer and performer. Her poetry has been widely published and anthologized, and her debut collection, Alright, Girl? (Burning Eye, 2020), was highly commended in the Forward Prize. On the stage, her one-woman show Fat Girls Don't Dance (Oberon, 2017) won the Saboteur Award for Best Spoken Word Show; Essex Girl (Oberon, 2019) was shortlisted for the Tony Craze Award and won Show of the Week at the VAULT Festival. She has been commissioned by the Royal Academy of Art, Stylist magazine and BBC Radio. She currently lives in Leeds.
Industry Reviews
Wry wit and honesty combine to make Swell a compelling narrative of marriage, pregnancy and motherhood. The world of mother and baby groups and "hashtag self-care" enables a rich vein of comic material, but it is emotional exposure and fragility... that makes Swell such a rewarding collection -- David Wheatley * Guardian *
I urge you to read this beautiful collection... The writing is eloquent and astute across many thoughts... Ferguson's poems offer a radical and contemporary portrayal of an experience as old as time -- Alice Ellerby * Juno Magazine *
A beautiful, powerful, profound collection of poems. There is an honesty that is both heart-breaking and more hopeful than anything else I've read on this subject. She makes me weep and wonder in equal measure -- Hollie McNish
Tender, lyrical, a family mise-en-scene, exploring the tiny narratives that write us. These poems are an umbilical, a feeding. Beautiful -- Joelle Taylor, author of C+nto
A feat. Both creatively and emotionally -- Caroline Bird
Maria Ferguson articulates the previously unsayable in these radical, tender poems. Swell gives voice to the full complexity of motherhood - the love next to the guilt, the ambivalence next to joy, even the desire to sometimes run away -- Kim Moore, author of All The Men I Never Married
