Sharon Olds, author of twelve poetry collections including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Stag’s Leap, has said that when she wrote about motherhood forty years ago, she was advised by editors (‘very snooty, very put-me-down’) to try Ladies Home Journal. For Olds, now celebrated as a bold poet of the body, there is some Schadenfreude in the anecdote, like Bob Dylan’s in ‘Talkin’ New York’ as he recounts his arrival in New York, ‘blowin’ my lungs out for a dollar a day’, only to be told ‘You sound like a hillbilly / We want folksingers here.’

Decades before Olds’s experience, around the time of Dylan’s, part of the ambivalence about Sylvia Plath’s poems was her writing about miscarriage and motherhood. When she placed things like the ‘stink of fat and baby crap’ and a woman stumbling ‘cow-heavy’ from bed to cot alongside rapture (‘O love, how did you get here?’), each was risky. Meanwhile in Australia, Gwen Harwood found that adopting one of her male noms de plume made poems about motherhood and the domestic publishable, where (the same) poems by Mrs Harwood from Hobart were not.

A generation on, a defiant shift co-exists with continuing caution about writing (in poetry and beyond) about the dreadful spectre of the domestic, or worse, a woman’s body not transformed by blazonry and objectification. The anthology What We Carry (2020), which included more than thirty poets’ work about birth, pregnancy loss, and infertility, exemplifies that defiance, as do Tracy K. Smith’s blazing and unabashed motherhood poems.