Motherhood

Every poet is a mother’s child, and many of our greatest poets have immortalized this elemental relationship. This anthology collects the work of more than seventy poets from across the centuries and around the world, each enshrining the miracle of motherhood in language at once distinctive and yet unfailingly intimate. Here, alongside the work of poets as diverse as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Sylvia Plath, is the work of tenth-century Japanese poet Izumi Shikibu, the seventeenth century’s Anne Bradstreet, Israel’s Yehuda Amichai, Ireland’s Eavan Boland and Paul Muldoon and Russia’s Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna Akhmatova. From Christina Rossetti’s To My First Love, My Mother and Emily Bronte’s Upon Her Soothing Breast to Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish and Frank O'Hara’s Ave Maria , the range of form and feeling is as varied as the experience itself.