Spore or Seed

Judges' comments

In Caitlin Maling’s Spore or Seed, she writes: ‘The poetic field rarely has children in it, often gods, often desire’. This book offers a rejoinder to this, placing experiences of pregnancy and motherhood in the context of the domestic and the Anthropocene. Shot through with wry asides and trenchant observation, these exhilarating poems begin from the body — scars, blood and gristle — and open to the abstract and universal.

When ‘the question of form arises’, Maling’s response connects the corporeal and poetic. Husked, brisk lines and their sharp breaks enact loss, as a child arrives ‘flame among flames’ into the blazing and precarious world Maling’s work has always limned. Other poems interleave prose pieces in a lyric essayistic mode. The poems refuse to resist the ecstatic, though a shrewd consciousness of the risk of the sentimental frames each lawless step in this direction. ‘Tangle of metaphors’, the speaker notes, after a flourish of meticulously crafted comparison. And metaphors, by placing together one thing and another allow consideration of self and other, whether the mother and the child in utero, or the human amid the more-than-human. In an interview, Maling praises ‘poems that speak back to what’s happening in this instant’. As they do this, these ferocious, tender, agile poems probe questions of scale and connection as they vault between the human, the domestic and the terrestrial.