Publisher's Synopsis
Grace Shiver is a multivocal meditation on violence, trauma, loss and renewal which wrestles with the seeming incommunicability of extreme experiences and the possibility that, as Heidegger suggests, What is spoken is never, and in no language, what is said. The manuscript is divided into six sections, each of which employs different poetic strategies to engage with a wide range of personal and historical issues and the silences that surround them. Grace Shiver explores, through many stances, the place of the mother. This can be in terms of many elements: absence, inadequacy, frustration and a sense of being overwhelmed--as well as in terms of what Stonehouse calls "mother-like capacity" and "milk work"--in other words, as a compassionate witness. She uses the vantage point of motherhood in a variety of forms to examine a series of themes: loss, violence and renewal.
