Never-Never land is a collection whose poems manage to be personal and yet at the same time have a broad appeal for the reader. I think this is largely because the poet has avoided sentimentality and self-pity when dealing with emotive subjects such as childbirth, the breakdown of a relationship and death of a parent.  Moreover Ward has created a clearly defined sense of character throughout the work. This woman is able to observe the minutia of the various settings she inhabits, at the same time expressing the passion she feels for her children who are clearly the loves of her life.

The narrators’ story is unravelled not chronologically but piecemeal rather like a novel. Many of the events are linked to a specific a landscape of her past, thereby giving the works context. The sections range from being ‘The English Wife’ in Italy to the ‘Bedsitterland’ of youth.  Each setting is rendered vivid by descriptions of the place and its colourful inhabitants. I was particularly impressed by the very fine poem ‘Piazza Bande Nere’ with its compassionate portrayal of the night-time escapes of prostitutes in Milan. This poem creates a fine contrast between the breast feeding mother who observes the street walkers describing them  with a mix of glamour ‘’At your post by the kerb you’re a goddess-‘’ and bald truth

you squat by a tree,

roll up your hem like a stocking

and clean out the last client.

What frames the book is the character’s love for her three children.  I have to confess that not being a mother myself when I encounter yet more verse about motherhood my mind tends to wander. However these poems are refreshing in that they deal with the difficulties and potential dangers of childbirth. “ You were wedged like the stubborn lamb’’ reveals how such fundamental moments like birth and death level us with other animals.  Ward does not pull her punches when describing the physical act of this difficult birth. We hear the screams, feel her fear as ‘’that was the moment our lives hung in the balance’’.  The language is a mix of raw beauty” Death was floating down on us like a feather to tip the scales’’ and honest physical details “then all the tight, hard bulk of my belly collapsed, like a ball deflated.’’

The narrator’s love affair with her ‘boys’ is a constant throughout the collection but perhaps the most touching verse deals with the ‘Third Child’ who is miscarried . It is the final section of this work that is particularly affecting. Having lost the child ‘’small as a walnut’’, the character ‘’took a tissue and cradled the baby’’…‘’Then I closed the tissue gently, liked the blankets on a cot.’’ This is an extraordinarily touching image that in its simplicity skilfully avoids becoming mawkish.

Given the almost omnipresence of her children throughout the collection, there is only modest reference to other members of her family specifically her own parents. Father is afforded two poems that nevertheless create the image of a kindly man from Belfast who never quite fits into English society. Yet despite his ability to diffuse a family argument with George Formby impressions, there is a sense of a mystery behind this man, accentuated in the lines ‘‘but when he spoke of his past he only said it once’’. Whatever intimacies were disclosed in this interchange they are withheld from the reader. Instead we are given the cryptic hint ‘’that the eeriest place on earth is a hurricane, the silent eye’’

This sense of mystery connected with the parents extends to the mother. A sequence of five poems is devoted to her death. This is clearly a time for reflection upon a relationship in which the character feels ‘’No guilt that we were never like mother and daughter,’ The sense of mystery lies in the lack of explanation as to why mother and daughter were so alienated.  However it does lead to   a discourse in  ‘Caring ‘  on the complex issue of a daughter’s  role in the nursing of  an ailing parent with its reiterated ‘’It must be wonderful to love your mother enough, when the time comes’’ . This frankness will I think resonate with many readers since we are not all cut out to be nurses even to our closest relatives. Yet what troubles in the poem is the character’s belief that to have the stomach for this nursing somehow proves the child loves the parents more than siblings who cannot undertake such tasks.

It is the husband who remains the shadiest character in the collection. Ward’s skill here is to give the impression of an unsuccessful marriage without explicit name calling. The tenor of the relationship and indeed the man’s nature is revealed gradually in the section on Italy. Frequently Ward very skilfully defines the man in one or two telling lines. Thus as a young mother in Milan ‘’My husband expects me awake ‘’ when he returns from night work despite her having breast fed all night. The word “expects” suggesting a cultural clash concerning the roles of women. This is built on in the poem ‘Fuchsias’ where the vividly coloured flowers are the only thing the  husband “ did like about England ‘’ suggesting that he had tried unsuccessfully to uproot himself rather like the flowers to an alien place, which eventually led to ‘’He’s in Italy now and I’m stuck with the fuchsias’’. After the section on Italy the partner all but disappears from the collection, the character’s family is thereafter established as herself and her children.

This is a somewhat enigmatic collection that on the one hand  gives us a great deal of explicit information about the character’s role as a mother but withholds details that are perhaps too personal or indeed private when writing of her relationship with her parents.

Never-Never Land comes from Ward Wood Publishing. 2011.  £8.99.  Buy your copy here.