“A greeting that not only gives great pleasure but illuminates our lives—like a message in a bottle.”—Robert McCrum, writer and editor

“Ten Poems about Mothers” is a title in the “Instead of a Card” series, based on the idea that sending a greeting card is a lovely gesture, and sending a booklet of poetry an even more meaningful one.

This much-loved mini anthology features poems celebrating all kinds of mothers. There’s the mother who can’t help cooking for “several hundred million imagined diners” and the mother who tries to keep her children’s diet free of harmful additives. There’s also the mother with a special voice for reading bedtime stories and even a yodeling Mother Earth who tells tales and gossips.

In one poem, a mirror in the family home seems to contain the past, present and future:

“… the mother
who looks like me, who
smiles at herself in her
mother’s mirror, the friendly
mirror in her mother’s house.”
—Maura Dooley, “Mirror”

What all the poems share is a sense of lasting love that flows through the years between mother and son or daughter, surviving the twists, turns and surprises of our lives.

Selected by Di Slaney

Poems by Laurie Bolger, Maura Dooley, Jonathan Edwards, Joanna Ingham, Jackie Kay, DH Lawrence, Carmina Masoliver, Roy McFarlane, Caleb Parkin, and John Siddique.

Cover Illustration by Sara Boccaccini Meadows

Dimensions 5.5" x 8.25"