Heirloom

Shortlisted for the Forward (Jerwood) Prize for Best First Collection 2025
A Poetry Book Society Commendation

'How the noise in my head grows and grows,
splinters into phantoms and shapes,

graceless muses for her cot-mobile.
How I terror.'

Moving from colonial to post-colonial St Lucia, this debut collection brings to light the inheritances of four generations of women, developing monologues, lyrics and narrative poems which enable us to see how past dysfunction, tyranny and terror structure the shapes of women's lives, and what they hand down to one another.

Uneasy inheritances are just the starting point for this debut's remarkable meditations: Should the stories of the past be told? Do they bring redemption or ruin? What are the costs of saying what happened? Beguiling and cathartic, Catherine-Esther Cowie's powerful, formally inventive poems reckon with the past even as they elegise and celebrate her subjects.