...clover
with an unlucky lobe,
the rarest of anomalies
that would flourish
and defeat her

from ‘Foetal Heart’

In 2007 Rebecca Goss’s newborn daughter Ella was diagnosed with Severe Ebstein’s Anomaly, a rare and incurable heart condition. She lived for sixteen months. Her Birth is a book-length sequence of poems beginning with Ella’s birth, her short life and her death, and ending with the joys and complexities that come with the birth of another child. Goss navigates the difficult territory of grief and loss in poems that are spare, tender and haunting: ‘Going home, back down / the river road, will be a foreign route without her’.


It must be at once the most painfully personal and the most restrained and sparsely written poetry collection of the year... It's poetry of witness. The language is simple; the images are simple; the feeling is all. It's feeling no one wants to have, and it is handled with immense grace.
Katy Evans-Bush, Poetry London

Something close to a poetic journal, the poems are by turns meditative and bewildered, uttered in the quietest of delicately weighted language, as if the failing child and the experience alike could not bear too much pressure or noise. What transformations there are, are tentative and quietly sustained.
Jane Draycott, Canto

She [writes] with astonishing success, to which the key is a brilliant sparseness consistently adding up to more than the sum of its parts. Her linguistic tact and her judgement never falter...
Lawrence Sail, Warwick Review

The poems have an almost unbearable beauty...
Peter Kennedy, poetrywivenhoe

The poems in Her Birth unfold their story of love, loss and grief for a baby daughter with pared-down precision and scorching intensity.
Helen Dunmore