"Your Tiny White Vests, Unworn": Contemporary Elegies of Maternal Loss

Abstract:

This essay asks whether poetry can articulate the experience of maternal loss, paying particular attention to questions of form. Focusing on two British poetry collections, Rebecca Goss's Her Birth (2013) and Karen McCarthy Woolf's An Aviary of Small Birds (2014), I argue that the contemporary elegy is currently being reshaped to explore the grief of losing a baby, and to bear witness to a life briefly lived. Drawing on Caroline Levine's emphasis on the affordances of form, the essay first examines these elegies' aural qualities thorugh the motif of the echo. Next I attend to the shaping of the poems, and how their word placement gives weight to the experience of baby loss. Finally, I consider how the modes of address at the end of the two collections negotiate the possibility of moving forward.