If we’re lucky our relationship with our mother’s will change and readjust many times over the years.
The sleepless beings enslaved by our infantile demands become our first patient teachers, then our cheer-leaders as we strike into the world.
It’s only later that we see them as individuals with dreams, aspirations and achievements beyond the ones they hold for us when a whole new relationship is possible.
I discovered my mother was a poet – which should have been obvious much earlier from the poems inscribed on the annual birthday cards – but I digress.
It was my privilege in 2019 to edit my mother’s work in her first book The Poetry of Reflection and see her through new eyes, and it was my pleasure on Mother’s Day to share with my mother the news her book is in Invercargill Public Library, and hear the story she was standing beside Mayor Eve Poole at the library’s opening ceremony.
Eve Poole died suddenly in office in 1992, the library she opened renamed in her honor; and in The Poetry of Reflection are two poems about her life, and death. And of course, there is Eve’s own story, Leading Lady, published in 2020 and written by her daughter Vivienne Allan.
