Healing the Pack is a book of retrieval. These are poems on the hunt for language to speak of intergenerational resilience and the power offered up by ancestors and perceptive children. Born out of working-class life in a coalmining community, the work explores unsilencing. It honours those who speak through the gaps of their suffering to share their strengths.
The assembled poems, which took 17 years to write, are more than descriptions of recovery, they are the process of a poet finding her words—to speak of pain and resistance. They are as much about learning to listen as they are about learning to speak. The poet pays deep attention to the undertones, the hushed and ignored, the barely visible, to those familial presences who linger with instructions for the writer, to break detrimental cycles, to heal and be healed.
Each poem brings past and present into focus, offering a new lens for self-realisation, never linear, always cyclical. Nature always at hand as guide.
Navigating this complex terrain of adversity and grief, we find a poet moving beyond fear and shame because there is a foundation of love, rooted in release through motherhood, nature, and language as witness, and primal call.