Before & After the Night

Before & After the Night, Jemma Borg’s third collection, asks with precision, candour and emotional clarity, what kind of life can be lived when facing personal and global loss – what can we grow ‘from the soil of our breaking’? Borg considers the methods for answering these questions through language, as the poems in the book move among scenes of birth and childhood to the transition of her partner into terminal illness and end-of-life experiences. Grief is seen as a complex experience – where ‘the barest stories grow to incandescence’ — devastating but also necessary and strangely magical. With wit, intellectual energy and unflinching honesty, this book does not advocate false positivity but is a call to remain alive in a beautiful world under threat.