Window for a Small Blue Child

Gerrie Fellows

ISBN 10: 1857548884 / ISBN 13: 9781857548884

Published by Carcanet Press Ltd, GB, 2007

About this Item

"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.

Seller Inventory # LU-9781857548884

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Window for a Small Blue Child
• Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd, GB
• Publication Date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1857548884
• ISBN 13: 9781857548884
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Science and technology face off against ancient images of fertility in this fascinating sequence of poems about the author’s experience of in vitro fertilization. Spanning 48 hours, some of the poems provide narrative and others concentrate on images; some offer passages from medical textbooks and others allude to folktales and myths. Scanners, timers, petri dishes, and sterile instruments predominate in the description of the procedure itself, but all the while the narrator’s thoughts are slipping away to gardens, dreams, and large questions about risk, choice, and biological destiny.

About the Author

Gerrie Fellows is the author of The Duntroon Toponymy, The Powerlines, and Technologies and Other Poems. Her poetry is anthologized in Intimate Expanses: XXV Scottish Poems 1978–2002, Modern Scottish Women Poets, and Scotlands: Poets and the Nation.