The Tidal Wife

by Kaddy Benyon

Kaddy Benyon's second collection, The Tidal Wife, is concerned with islands: both as physical landforms and as emotional states; the need to retreat and be cut off as much as the need to reconnect and come to trust the pulse of one's internal tide. The poems address the day-to-day realities of being wife, mother, poet at the same time as living with mental illness. They draw on the glory and fury of nature's flora, fauna and weather systems to describe shifting states of `I'.

96 pages, Paperback

Published July 15, 2018

Reviews

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I returned to this collection again and again during the hot weeks of summer, to be transported to a series of stormy islands off the British coast. Kaddy Benyon's poems evoke beaches of shell and driftwood, the barely-won shelter of bothy or castle ruins, and the surrounding wildlife and weather. This is a fine book, its language taut with the tidal pull between home and elsewhere, solitude and family.

[Elizabeth Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

“She envies the intuition of the seas, how they know like a kind of homing when to draw close, when to retreat.”

This collection of poems examines the relationship between (wo)man and nature in a new and insightful way. Many of the poems in the collection really stand out through their imagery and I have found myself returning to them many times since I first read them.

[J.S. Watts · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, haunting and exposed poems

[Anna Sinn · Rating 4 out of 5]

What really stood out to me in this collection was the sense of loss and grief - loss of loved ones but also of oneself. This feeling touched me deeply.