Daughter by Maureen Eppstein
$17.99
Maureen Eppstein’s Daughter is an elegy, a cradle-song, and a manifesto for the young woman she was and stillborn daughter she birthed amid the casual misogyny and medical carelessness of the times. Long held as a painful, shameful secret, these poems are an act of release and healing, a descent into the underworld, and a rebirth into air. It will give solace and companionship to the myriad women who have suffered similar losses and never spoken of them, and remain as a testament of a mother’s love.
–Alison Luterman, author of In the Time of Great Fires
From the opening lines of “Hearts and Flowers” through last sestina, “Remnants,” Maureen Eppstein wraps us in an elegiac language both lyrical and haunting, and with a masterful hand she leads us to experience first-hand loss, anger, grief, and finally the joy of healing. We emerge from this stunning journey with a new appreciation for the world that can only come from the crevices of pain felt deeply by a mother who has lost a child. In the final pages she confesses to a shared sisterhood, When finally I named her, I learned to mourn, and her victory is our shared triumph when she declares I am the valley and mountain, the world and stardust from whence it came.
—Elizabeth Kirkpatrick Vrenios, author of Concerto for an Empty Frame
Description
Daughter
by Maureen Eppstein
Paper
List: $17.99
979-8-88838-564-7
2024
Over a span of sixty-plus years, Maureen Eppstein traces in the Daughter poems her deeply personal arc of healing from the loss of a child and her sense of connection with all living things that evolved from her experience.
Maureen Eppstein’s most recent poetry collection is Horizon Line (Main Street Rag 2020). Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Originally from New Zealand, she lives on the Mendocino Coast of Northern California.
Henri Bensussen (verified owner) –
from Sinister Wisdom, https://www.sinisterwisdom.org/node/778
Maureen Eppstein’s Daughter is also about death, in her case, a first pregnancy that ended with a “stillbirth,” a word that foretells the penultimate moment of expulsion into personhood, the fateful stillness of a life that lives only as a memory. She pours out her story in small poems, releasing history and the emotions she had buried, now, at age eighty-six. These poems are the chapters in a tale of a young woman, married less than a year, about to give birth, and the doctor who didn’t believe her, who said don’t call me at 3 a.m. She trusted him; after all, she’d been brought up to care for others, obey directions, and to not make a fuss.
Not allowed to mourn, she must stay silent, she must “carry on”; she was simply “ill.” Years later, widowed, living alone near the sea and surrounded by a community of women, she finally lets herself acknowledge the truth of it and allows herself to honor this daughter, naming her “Jane.” She visits the grave in a New Zealand cemetery, where she hears voices of the dead: “we are the birds,” they whisper. At home, the swallows build a nest above her kitchen door. She watches them fledge. She feels the connection with nature in “an interwoven chain of being.” These are poems of resilience and hope that nurture us with life and comfort us even in death.
Originally from Aotearoa/New Zealand, Maureen Eppstein earned an M.A. in History from the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, before moving to the U.S. in the late 1960s. She now lives on the Mendocino Coast of California and is a former executive director of the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference. Her work is strongly influenced by the poetry of Jane Hirshfield, with whom she has studied. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. The focus in her poetry on the connectedness of all living things stems from the experience of visiting her stillborn daughter’s burial site, as described in this collection.