Description

"Window for a Small Blue Child" is the story of the poet's experience of in vitro fertilisation, a sequence of poems underscored by the seasons and by the biological clock of a woman in her forties as she navigates the risks and choices, the drugs and rituals of fertility treatment. In a voice which moves between narrative and image, between lyrical experience and medical text she explores what it is to be engaged with a technique so much of which is enacted in a woman's body yet which takes its name from forty-eight hours of events in a lab. In the contemporary fairy tale of IVF science and nature interact, bodies become maps, but who is telling the story? In these poems, windows may open into gardens or bodies or dreams, and folk tales jostle with the images of science: its scans and procedures, the labs and Petri dishes which might or might not cradle a future child.