Nine Arches Press
Adventures in poetry
The Snow Globe
Jenny Pagdin
ISBN: 978-1-913437-86-2
eISBN: 978-1-913437-87-9
Price: £11.99
Publication date: 22nd February 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Territories: World
Extent: 76pp
DCF: Poetry Collections
Cover artwork: 'The faces of love' (lino print, 2023) © Mark Rowden www.wingedlionpress.com.au
The Snow Globe is Jenny Pagdin’s powerful, sensitive and stark debut collection. Written from first-hand experience, under the glass dome of postpartum psychosis, her poetry depicts a fearsome, glittering inner storm of severe mental illness during new motherhood, moving through illness, through snow flurry and sunshine, to a place of recovery and love.
Threaded through this book are illuminating and courageous poems that settle and unsettle in equal measure. They cluster moth-like around spiritual and mythical figures, unravelling and remaking themselves with needlework and yarn, threaded along shorelines and under starry night skies. Jenny Pagdin’s skilful and attentive use of a variety of forms reflects multiple and jarring realities – with poems dancing their own chaotic, fragmented and strange glinting beauty towards resolution.
Praise for The Snow Globe:
‘Offering an unflinching account of postpartum psychosis, The Snow Globe is raw, painful yet light-filled as the poet steers towards clarity and healing. These poems have risen from a dark place and with the tender force of Pagdin’s pen, they make a crucial book.’ – Rebecca Goss
‘What do we base ourselves on when our body-mind disconnects from the world around us? Through destabilising metaphor and lucid imagery, Pagdin stunningly evokes the experience of postpartum psychosis, demonstrating the power of poetry to connect us, even when we feel at our most shameful. Like The Snow Globe of its title, Pagdin’s collection shapes a fragile, shifting, startling environment into which these poems compel us. Throughout, the writing sparkles. Love recurs as a base to reconnect with, to fly from, to home to. These are remarkable, dignified, ‘full-ripe’ poems that breath-takingly reveal experience rarely discussed. A vital book.’ – Heidi Williamson.
‘From threads of sorrow, deep love and the wildness of new motherhood, Jenny Pagdin's poems weave such fine cloth. Alive to the rawness of being, these carefully-crafted poems lead us through a beautiful and important exploration of post-partum psychosis. Unpicking the seams of the poet's own experience with bare honesty and tenderness, they move from the white heat of bewilderment towards healing and luminosity.‘
– Liz Berry
Jenny Pagdin’s pamphlet Caldbeck was published by Eyewear in 2017, shortlisted for the Mslexia pamphlet competition and listed by the Poetry Book Society. Jenny lives in Norwich with her family, where she works in the voluntary sector. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and a BA in English from Oxford University. Her work is featured or forthcoming in New Welsh Review, Smoke, Magma, Ambit, Wild Court, The Stand, Finished Creatures, Interpreter’s House, Ink, Sweat & Tears and an Emma Press anthology. www.jennypagdin.co.uk
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