The Tidal Wife

Kaddy Benyon's second collection, The Tidal Wife, is concerned with islands: both as physical landforms and as emotional states; the need to retreat and be cut off as much as the need to reconnect and come to trust the pulse of one's internal tide. The poems address the day-to-day realities of being wife, mother, poet at the same time as living with mental illness. They draw on the glory and fury of nature's flora, fauna and weather systems to describe shifting states of 'I'.