from the editor's desk
Review of ‘Spore or Seed’ by Caitlin Maling
Maling, Caitlin. Spore or Seed. Fremantle Press, 2023. RRP: $29.99, 128 pp, ISBN: 9781760992590.
Ellie Fisher
This child is born
to neither forest nor downs
and to only two seasons
air-conditioning and sunburn. (92)
The subject of motherhood has, in recent years, become normalised as a subject worth writing—and reading—about. Escaping the imposed implications of the implied trivialities of the domestic, which cankered previous generations’ work on motherhood, a new wave of authors have significantly altered what it means to communicate the bodily experiences of pregnancy and birth. There is an intensity about the resulting works; a kind of defiance which demands—rather than begs—to be taken seriously: politically, aesthetically, and ontologically.
Lauren Elkin notes, in her 2018 essay ‘Why All the Books About Motherhood?’, that these newly-born texts ‘are putting motherhood on the map […] arguing forcefully, through their very existence, that it is a state worth reading about for anyone, parent or not’ (np). Internationally and domestically, there has been a flowering of publications which evidence Elkin’s argument: from Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon’s If There Is a Butterfly That Drinks Tears, to Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From and Laura McPhee-Browne’s Little Plum. These books encapsulate the fluid dualities present within the experience of motherhood itself: pleasure and pain, delicacy and muscularity.
Caitlin Maling’s fifth poetry collection, Spore or Seed, fits neatly into this burgeoning genre of modern writing on motherhood, injecting a sense of urgency into its approach. Branching across nine parts—an echo of the months of pregnancy—Maling’s poems approach the reader in waves that gradually fork towards moments of resonance. In the backdrop of the volume, a pressing question unfolds: what does it mean to bring life into a world threatened by environmental upheaval? Maling deftly navigates the interplay of pregnancy and birth against the unsettling canvas of the climate crisis; a constant vibration of anxiety hums through her poems. This sense of unease serves as a masterstroke, driving blood through the collection as a whole while emphasising the intricate interconnectedness of all life forms on stolen land.
If this singular, drawn-out thrum is the (literal) heart of Maling’s work here, then the ways in which she sketches her subjects—obscuring in order to trace their outlines, to lengthen the moment before reveal and release—is a skin. In ‘Section Two: In Progress’, she uses this technique to full effect, imagining her unborn infant in utero:
I can never know where you are exactly, a murky constellation of might-be-limbs cushioned by fluid.
Sometimes there’s a ripple, a quiver, or you press against the meniscus like I’ve caught a shadow, a fish on the line at the point where it starts to catch the surface light. (27)
Through her refusal to reveal everything—to us, and even to herself—Maling challenges us to feel the discomfiture of this moment by scrying towards half-realised shapes and acknowledging that, sometimes, the body contains knowledge that the mind can only half grasp. In so doing, she moves form to fit her needs: enjambing lines spool and unspool, slicing to the quick before trickling out, slowly.
Later, this attentiveness to corporeality meshes with the realities of modernity. A C-section lays out the speaker’s body under the hospital lights, vulnerable, ‘everything […] sterilised’ (97). Birth becomes a wound, clean and aseptic:
Motherhood is bloodless,
I am ashamed to say.
This far into the suburbs,
the danger is not
to smell the shit (‘Uniform’ 98)
This realism—the juxtaposition between joy and anxiety, between sterilised middle-class fantasy and fleshy veracity—is exactly what Elkin pinpoints as a bridging theme across recent texts on motherhood. Maling is adept at walking this path whilst also maintaining a grasp of how slippages between these kinds of experiences thread together on the page.
In the closing pages of Spore or Seed, the collection returns to the specific desires present within the post-partum body; Maling speaks towards a lush sensuality, sharp with potential recoil:
No one is ever
appropriately ugly
with need. I want
to ask where
is your own language
of desire? I picture
the raw en pointe toes
of dancers in movies
in their grapefruit pink shoes
this, I say,
is how you move
the poem. (‘I eat my grapefruit’ 112–113)
To experience motherhood is to be broken down; likewise, to feel the motion of desire is to allow the self to become more than the sum of its parts: to be shattered open, to be seen as one truly is. Maling closes the gap between these two poles by making explicit the links between them, and by acknowledging the very frame of her expression: the poem itself.
Writing motherhood in this way affects change within the literary ecosystem, altering both how experiences such as these are expressed, and the ways in which they are received. Elkin suggests that the strength of contemporaneous works in this vein—in contrast to earlier considerations of motherhood—lies in their ‘unerring seriousness, their ambition, the way they demand that the experience of motherhood in all its viscera be taken seriously as literature’ (np). In a way, writing motherhood has become a catalyst for a renewal of Cixous’ écriture feminine: a new methodology with which to conceptualise, mythologise and communicate the self, doubled, through maternity. It would be tempting, certainly, to argue that this genre is carving a fresh niche in the literary canon; but, as Elkin suggests, these texts are ‘countercanon’, in that they ‘read against’ traditional generic constraints with their ‘lack of interest in the interior lives of mothers’ (np), and instead seek to reveal that which has long been seen as too domestic to be of mainstream literary interest.
Maling’s work goes a step further: it implicates the mother—singular—within the plurality of the more-than-human world. And, in so doing, she offers a collection which expects its readers to pay close attention to the ripples and ruptures of her words. Spore or Seed kicks and pushes; it circles and bleeds. Throughout, the burning heart of Maling’s poetics—a triptych muse split between moments of intense personal resonance, the implications of stolen land and the anxieties of advancing ecological breakdowns—draws out the muscular sinew of Spore or Seed. The result is a tenderness which is both soft and brutal; sometimes bloody, but always beautiful.
Work Cited
Elkin, Lauren. ‘Why All the Books About Motherhood?’, The Paris Review, July 17 (2018). Sourced at: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/07/17/why-all-the-books-about-motherhood/.
Ellie Fisher is a writer. Her work has appeared in print and online in Westerly Magazine, Pulch Mag, Gem zine, Night Parrot Press, and Swim Meet Lit Mag, amongst others. Ellie is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at The University of Western Australia. She splits her time between Kinjarling and Boorloo.
