Foretokens

Sarah Howe, published by Chatto & Windus

In Sarah Howe’s Foretokens, the exploration of identity becomes the keynote of her mother’s life, her own, and her children’s; they cannot be separated. Nor can memory from artifact, anger from love, history from future. With the reading of each poem, the implication of the ones before are tantalisingly revealed. In reading the whole collection, we can see how the enigmatic ways of each aspect of this family weaves itself into each poem. 

 As Howe has her own children, she reflects upon her childhood and her mother’s childhood. Whilst her mother’s obsession with laundry is an irritation of her teen years, it was an expectation of her mother’s adolescence, when she sold by her father as a young girl in communist China.

 It is this history that “spread[s] out the pages of many lives”. Her mother’s trauma contorts itself into her own and will contort itself into the next generation as Howe finds the “girl who is not yet someone’s mother” inside the “clench of her [daughter’s] little fist”.  Here, China from the end of the twentieth century cannot be distinguished from present-day England.

 As these poems recontextualise one another through repeated words and refracted sentiments, the collection drives a strong narrative. Non-linear structuring tells a clearer story than a chronological timeline could, as it allows for accounts of different periods of time to come up against each other and inform one another. It is not comfortable, it is not logical – it is family.

Reviewed by Tippi McGarry.