Foretokens

‘Unearthed in a clear-out, a picture calendar she’s kept – hoarding, I’ve learnt, is a mark of the emigrant – across continents and time’. So begins Sarah Howe’s extraordinary collection, returning to the riddle of belonging she explored in her award-winning debut, ‘Loop of Jade’. At the heart is her own mother’s clouded past: abandoned as a baby and taken in, at the turbulent dawn of Communist China, by a woman with her own hidden motives. Now a mother herself, Howe finds herself re-examining this unreliable narrative with fresh sight. Sifting through her own history, the poet asks, how can a new generation transform a shattered inheritance? And what is lost and gained in the pursuit? What unfolds is a personal Babel of voices and identities, and an examination of the contradictory legacies of colonialism, where poems – past and present – act as ‘foretokens’, omens of what lies ahead.