On Grief, Motherhood and Poetry with Tamarin Norwood
We’re honoured to be joined by Tamarin Norwood on Thursday 14 March, for an evening discussing her important book, The Song of the Whole Wide World: On Grief, Motherhood and Poetry. Tamarin will be in conversation with Sophie and will be signing books. The Real Magic bar will be open.
An extraordinary memoir of anticipatory grief, seventy-two minutes of life and a silent maternity leave, from artist and academic Tamarin Norwood.
A few months into pregnancy, Tamarin Norwood learned that the baby she was carrying would not live. Over the sleepless weeks that followed, Tamarin, her husband and their three-year-old son tried to navigate the unfamiliar waters of anticipatory sorrow and to prepare for what was to come.
Written partly during pregnancy and partly during the silent maternity leave that followed, The Song of the Whole Wide World is an emergency response to grief held somewhere between the womb, the grave and the many stories that bind them: stories drawn from medical science, poetry, liturgy, vivid waking dreams of underwater life, and knowledge held deep within the body.
This profoundly moving and intimate account offers a lyrical and fearless meditation on birth, death, and the possibilities of consolation.
Dr Tamarin Norwood is a writer and academic with a background in fine art. She has written on drawing, metaphor, memorial and grief, and has an interest in ritual and rural history. She is a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, a visiting fellow at the University of Bath Centre for Death and Society, and a Leverhulme research fellow at Loughborough University.
In 2021 she won The Lancet Wakley Essay Prize for her essay Something Good Enough. She lives and works in Northamptonshire.
‘Beautiful and undeniably – necessarily – sad.’
— Pandora Sykes, author of How Do We Know We’re Doing It Right?
