Out of Eden: an appreciation Abigail Ottley’s courageous and powerful new collection of 87 poems, Out of Eden, doesn’t approach you stealthily. Opening the book at random, I’m hit in the face by the tale of a woman wrestling a pig; she ‘rams her whole broad body into the pig’s open throat [...] until the carcass of the beast splits in two, blood and guts spilling out in great gobbets’ (‘Distillation from my dream book 5’, p90). At the end of this performance, the woman takes a bow, and smiles. I feel her triumph. And while this is perhaps the grisliest and most explicit image in the book for a woman’s victory over violent misogyny and deep-rooted sexism, is the underlying theme of the collection. I am thrilled and terrified by these poems, often both at once. Many of them are prose poems – a form I find particularly suitable to plain speaking; many are seemingly autobiographical but written mostly in the third person. Pain, betrayal and tragedy are here, and also rage, as Ottley tells the difficult truth about her life with an unflinching honesty born of suffering, recovery and escape. But the rage is reined in, even visibly contained in the foursquare paragraph design of the prose poems. There is no melodrama here. Accounts of rape and its aftermath, experiences of sex without choice or consent, are expressed in precise, assiduously unemotional language that invites a forensic (at least as much as an empathetic) approach to the poem texts: 1963 / I am washing the sheets you stained with my girlhood / in case your mother sees them / your mother will be home by four / the sheets must be dry and on the bed / you are scolding me now you have had your way /[...] I am drying the wet patch on the sheet / you are still drinking coffee / (‘Eleven years and counting’, pp47-8)​ The reader is distanced, but cannot look away. Ottley looks at motherhood and daughterhood from the perspective of both, exploring the eternal ambivalence of the relationship. There is the mother ‘who went white if there was any kind of row’ and ‘made one rule: no arguing’ in the family home (‘Nana Tilly knew her own mind’, p42). There’s the horrifying sceptical mother of the raped girl, saying ‘You could have said no’ (‘Persephone’s dilemma’, p44), and the fragile, dying mother at the end of the book – ‘I saw you were broken/ like a long-forgotten promise’ (‘Last look at my mother before leaving’, p102). And to her daughter the narrator in ‘Snow Queen’ (p33) confesses: ‘Still I must love every Arctic inch of you since / I am the mother who bore you’. There are witches (Hecate, p26) and women from Greek mythology (Persephone – herself a daughter and a grandmother -- pp38, 44). And there’s the narrator’s formidable grandmother, Nana Tilly, who appears in many poems and in fact acquires mythological status herself, not just for her glamour, embodied in a rediscovered pair of evening gloves (Nana Tilly’s gloves, pp73-4), but for her force-of-nature fierceness: ‘when Nana Tilly went into battle she had a cry like one of the Valkyries’ (‘Nana Tilly & the Tally Man’, p75). Coldness is a recurring theme, not just a style of expression: cold water (a river, the sea), the Snow Queen, the front parlour – a room ‘for looking at, for keeping clean’, but too cold actually to live in. ‘Cold water fish to the angler’ (p51) is a particularly chilling account of long-standing abuse, the fish being landed and dying. But there is warmth too, and tenderness, too, for instance in ‘the rain-smudged garden where we giggled and did not suspect (‘Seasons’, p28), or in ‘Bathing with my father’, p60, or the almost unbearably tender ‘Taking care’ (p61), where the narrator washes her mother’s hair: Now her head is in my hands, her small, frail skull. The bones of it are birdlike. [...] When she trembles, I imagine she’ll take flight. Each poem in this book is a treasure. But not a soft treasure, not something to cuddle down into. These poems are not comfortable. They have hard edges, they are precisely faceted, like jewels. There are "inky satin skies / hand-stitched with diamonds (‘On the necromancy of daughters’, p17). Softness doesn’t guarantee survival. These are stories of women surviving, women finding and using their strength, women winning through by dint of struggle, women escaping. Abigail Ottley’s collection has the courage to tell the truth without equivocation or dilution, whatever the price. Read these poems and you will understand more clearly how the act of Being, worn as armour, can be a means of survival. The refusal to be tamed: ‘I will be no man’s hawk or wet-eyed spaniel. I am Sorex araneus. I bite.’ (’Like the moonrat I am crepuscular’, p76. Mandy Macdonald, poet