Published 2024. Paperback, 88pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848618916 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

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

"A tour-de-force – like standing in a fresh gale while it blows out the corners of a world structured and confined by preconceptions of mothers, mothering and childbirth. In Matronymics , Ashton enlarges and then minutely examines this tethering to cycles of reproduction, nurture and death - “the way all things must go, / height to meek mud, erasure then rebirth”. She uses her gifts as a poet to excavate her own, often visceral, experiences of a “dis-ease” of being female in a male world, stripping her encounters with this sense of predestiny and confinement down to a real, broad journey of grief and sheer wonder. In their wilful, unconstrained and eloquent form and language, and in their range of scale, these poems perform a process of recovery and self-invention amid “worldly wrought dogma”, hoping for compassionate, inclusive resolution: “a simple truth // offered to all comers / on the square // each in their own / starved universe”. —Lesley Harrison

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