Book description
Shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize, this is the third collection
from a poet of powerful emotions and vivid imagery. The Huntress
underlines the author's reputation as a questing poet capable of
outstanding imagistic flourishes and surprising associations. In this
emotional follow-up to The Zoo Father, a daughter is haunted by her
mentally ill mother until a series of remarkable transformations help
her to conquer painful childhood memories. Over the course of the
collection, the feared mother becomes a rattlesnake, an Aztec goddess,
a Tibetan singing bowl, a stalagmite, a praying mantis, and then a
ghost orchid, yet in the central poem the daughter becomes a cosmic
stag and escapes her mother-huntress.
