Reviews

The Road, Slowly by Liz Quirke

foggy_rosamund's review

4.0

A moving and important first collection, The Road, Slowly explores the journey to motherhood for a queer women in Ireland. Quirke's poems are deceptively simple as they capture the intimacy of relationships and the experience of inhabiting a changing body. Because it is still outside the norm, motherhood within a lesbian relationship is still a liminal place, which doesn't fully correspond to society's expectations of family. Quirke allows the reader to enter the place with her, to form bonds with children not born of your own body, as in Nurture: "In the nine months I didn't nourish you, / I made notes, I studied the seasons / for ingredients to encourage your growth." She also explores the ways in which having children force us to experience the world in a new way. Some of her poems slip effortlessly into the thoughts of a child such as In a Minute, in which the toddler experience "no time" and Quirke tells the reader to "count the day her way / in sandwiches and cut fruit / kisses and warm damp faceclothes / a sweaty forehead against your neck". In a few places, I felt this collection could have been pared back a little, but overall it is a thought-provoking and original work that I recommend.