A boundary of stiff lace intricacies
of snowflakes imprinted
like the cut-out faces of children
hushed in the dark of a puppet-show

Steam condenses on a window pane

The snow child melts and vanishes

                             'A Folk Tale'

Window for a Small Blue Child is the story of the poet's experience of in vitro fertilisation, a sequence of poems underscored by the seasons and by the biological clock of a woman in her forties as she navigates the risks and choices, the drugs and rituals of fertility treatment. In a voice which moves between narrative and image, between lyrical experience and medical text she explores what it is to be engaged with a technique so much of which is enacted in a woman's body yet which takes its name from forty-eight hours of events in a lab. In the contemporary fairy tale of IVF science and nature interact, bodies become maps, but who is telling the story? In these poems, windows may open into gardens or bodies or dreams, and folk tales jostle with the images of science: its scans and procedures, the labs and Petri dishes which might or might not cradle a future child.

Contents

 

I  TheInfertility Cycle

The Lily and the Egg 11

Birthday Card for the Autumn Equinox            13

Poem for a Peptide Hormone            14

A True Copy of Her Last Menstrual Cycle   15

Oestrogen            16

A Pink and Blue Poem             17

A Folk Tale            19

Information            20

Dream Baby (I)            21

Ancestral Luck            22

Her Body            23

In the Shape of a Map  24

A Box for Love            26

A Cytohistoarchitecture   27

Dream Baby (II)       28

Conversation (Blue Tablecloth)            29

Wish List            30

Blue Mountain Postcard: Six Slides from a Testicular Biopsy  31

A Film Made in a Cold Light            32

In Answer to the Question, What is Possible?            33

Window for a Small Blue Child    34

Absence             35

 

II  ThePellucid Zone

Invocation            39

Ice Baby            40

Picture Show            41

Numbers and Leaves 42

The Light Box             43

Infertility Rite I: Body Clock             44

Still Life with Cup      45

Infertility Rite II: In River Light     46

Blood Text            47

Infertility Rite III: Blue Window            48

Timing  50

A Map Showing Interior Space            51

Photomicrograph I      52

Centrifugal Image   53

Night Laboratory            54

Photomicrograph II     55

The Ghost in the Machine            56

Photomicrograph III    57

The Arbor Vitae    58

Box for the Future Tense            60

Intimations             61

The Future Tense   62

What the Body Promises            65

Image for a Sonar Room            66

 

III  TheFlowerings of the Possible             67

 

 

Glossary            76

Notes and Acknowledgements      80