Daughter of the Sun is a collection of poems by Rachel Spence. Cover by Emma Dai’an Wright.
‘Saltmarsh days, unwatered.
Struggling to find the poem in the morning,
the garden waking to the creak and clink
of shutters, my neighbour’s taut croon
to her toddler. Had forgotten how May
clogs Venice with the scent of jasmine
how a baby’s cry is more cat than human.
This time last year we didn’t know you had
just weeks to live. Sat in your garden
watching the hen pigeon plunge over
and over into your solarnum unless
her chicks were yelping out her absence.
John Cage found music in the dust of silence.
My sonnet in your body dissolving into blue.’
From the gentle rivers of Shropshire to the heat-baked seas of Greece, Daughter of the Sun radiates with mothers and tracks our orbits around them.
Split into two parts, a sonnet sequence recounts Spence’s time reconnecting with her estranged mother – caring for her through illness and grieving her passing – before a bold rewriting of the myths around Medea reimagines her not as a murderous witch but a child-free scientist ahead of her time.
