Review of After Birth by Elizabeth Ross // Margaryta Golovchenko
To those looking for a more down-to-earth approach to thinking about motherhood, Elizabeth Ross’s After Birth is a fitting candidate. Rather than radically reevaluating what it means to be a mother, what Ross does is simpler but impactful, widening the narrow lens through which the act of becoming a mother–both physically and emotionally—has been explored recently.Popular culture immortalizes moments like birth itself, first steps, and first words. After Birth is interested in smaller, more mundane moments that exist beside these childhood benchmarks. Ross works to create a timeline of motherhood and parenting that charts the process of growing up for both the child and the mother. The literal growth of a baby through stages such as weaning or eating strawberries for the first time is balanced by the emotional growth of the collection’s speaker in the form of a retrospective look at the past:
Before Starbucks, Baroque was just a word in your first-year art history text.If coffee was capable of artistry, it was to keep you caffeinated
The retrospective approach reminds the viewer that there is value not only in the past but in the feeling of nostalgia that accompanies change. As we see in the somber and intimidate “Happily,” how we understand love and happiness evolves as we grow up, but it doesn’t change what we felt in the past. By introducing a discussion of generational differences to the collection, Ross reminds the reader that parenting does not occur in a vacuum, nor is decision making confined to the present moment. To be a parent means acknowledging your own upbringing whether was it “good” or something that you want to improve in your own parenting. It also means, as the speaker in “Visiting the Grandparents” does, realizing “[m]y parents are grandparents,” and that rigidity is impossible with the natural progression of time. After Birth charts two parallel narratives of motherhood in After Birth: one in which the speaker’s identity is closely intertwined with that of her child, emphasizing the way the progression of time is often linked to milestones and physical growth; the other where the speaker is examined as an individual, as more than merely a mother figure. The latter is especially the case in “Body of Water,” a poem composed of several parts that occupies the entire second section of the collection, in which Ross addresses the pain and difficulties that still often go unseen and which are still stigmatized. It is therefore Ross’ ability to weave dark humour into her moving and often thought-provoking pieces that gives After Birth its deep and unforgettable sparkle, reminding us that sometimes it is only through humour that we are able to understand what exactly is happening as the speaker proclaims:
I wanted to shit the bed, wanted the honesty of it, not the pain chart’s smiley-to-sad-face portraiture.
Margaryta Golovchenko is a settler-immigrant, poet, critic, and academic based in Tkaronto/Toronto, Treaty 13 and Williams Treaty territory, Canada. The author of two poetry chapbooks, she is completing her MA in art history at York University and can be found sharing her (mis)adventures on Twitter @Margaryta505.
