Matronymics

In her second collection Kate Ashton examines woman's estate from the warring perspectives of creativity and procreativity. Born into her biological destiny, woman is harnessed at adolescence to procreative necessity; she may refuse, she must choose. But what if the unconscious leads inexorably towards another equally all-consuming fate, as artist? The overwhelming gravitas, beauty and mystery of motherhood is presented in all its extraordinary, paradoxical reality. Here is an often jarringly intense examination of emotive and moral integrity, refuting soft focus. Dawning awareness of a distinctly matrix-centred spiritual reality; one that can find no foothold, no expression within any hierarchical system. A majestic alternative worldview: primeval, anarchic, ambivalent, self-referential and innately free of masculine conceptualisation. One in which acts of artistic creation and procreation may either brutally oppose or embrace each other, but which always involve a tender agony of love. "A book of naming, a book of rendering into words - mother, sister, daughter, child - but far more and all joined by their sheer delight in language. This is a deeply spiritual, clear eyed and whole-hearted collection, poems so finely tuned they will haunt the imagination long after the book is closed." - John Glenday