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Bath of Herbs Emily Zobel-Marshall

Bath of Herbs By Emily Zobel-Marshall

Bath of Herbs by Emily Zobel-Marshall


£9.49
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9 in stock

Summary

Beautifully crafted, honest and thoughtful first collection which explores the complexity of mixed-race, hybrid identities and relationships to the English and Welsh mountains, fells, rivers and shorelines from an othered, unmappable, positionality.

Bath of Herbs Summary

Bath of Herbs by Emily Zobel-Marshall

Bath of Herbs is her beautifully crafted, honest and thoughtful first collection which explores the complexity of mixed-race, hybrid identities and relationships to the English and Welsh mountains, fells, rivers and shorelines from an othered, unmappable, positionality. It honours the lives of Black and Brown women and asks how they can reclaim space, both practically and conceptually. It celebrates and mourns the unspoken pain and joys of motherhood; of menstrual cycles, childbirth, tending to sick children with life-threatening illnesses, the death of mothers, love in all its myriad forms and the desire to escape the constraints of domestic and family life towards different kinds of freedoms. It also revisits the confusing world of childhood; the inexplicable actions of adults and the bullies who despise perceived difference. There is her ownership of a writerly inheritance handed down from her grandfather, the Black Martiniquan writer, Joseph Zobel, but also an awareness that this heritage has involved a movement away from the Black peasant world Zobel wrote about towards a comfortable Europeanness of being. Other poems address the security of a middle-class life and the many pleasures it offers but also how that world can be broken apart by death, by serious illness, by the fear that the channels of communication in a marriage have gone down and how, as a woman expected to hold everything together, one is sometimes forced to take refuge in the wildest fantasies. Linking the whole is an engagement with the possibilities of healing: as in the bath of herbs in which her grandmother bathed her mother after giving birth; in the physicality of running and purificatory swimming in a river; in the care a hospital gives to her child and in the healing power of the natural world.

About Emily Zobel-Marshall

Emily Zobel Marshall is a Reader in Cultural Studies at Leeds Beckett University. She is an expert on the trickster figure in the folklore, oral cultures and literature of the African Diaspora and has published widely in these fields. She has also established a Caribbean Carnival Cultures research platform and network that aims to bring the critical, creative, academic and artistic aspects of carnival into dialogue with one another. She is a regular contributor to BBC radio discussions on racial politics and Caribbean culture. She has had poems published in the Peepal Tree Press anthology Weighted Words (2021), Magma ('The Loss', Issue 75, 2019), Smoke Magazine (Issue 67, 2020) and The Caribbean Writer (Vol 34, 2020, Vol 35, 2021 & Vol 36, 2021). She is Vice Chair of the David Oluwale Memorial Association, a charity committed to fighting racism and homelessness, and a Creative Associate of the art-based youth charity The Geraldine Connor Foundation.

Additional information

NGR9781845235574
9781845235574
1845235576
Bath of Herbs by Emily Zobel-Marshall
New
Paperback
Peepal Tree Press Ltd
2023-07-07
72
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
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