Forgetting my Father by Jill Abram Broken Sleep Books

Jill Abram’s Forgetting my Father is a poignant portrait of family life and a daughter’s bond with her ailing father. Abram’s poetry is warm and gentle, keeping a space for the moment: “I remember Dad when he still remembered me”. Abram writes of love, hope and loss in tender and neatly observed poems, which, in the words of Dylan Thomas: ‘rage against the dying of the light’.

 

PRAISE for Forgetting My Father:

Jill Abram’s poetry is richly detailed, precious with memory and tenderness – a family inheritance of shared tea and ice cream, childhood summers, crossword clues, keys which don’t fit, and long lost letters. At the heart of the poems, the pin-sharp living grief of losing a father in increments. Forgetting My Father is in fact about anything but forgetting; it is poetry as a way of holding onto what matters, of making what we know we treasure and we know we’ll lose find endurance in words.

   — Jane Commane

 

In Abram’s generous and touching pamphlet, both life and death are explored and filtered through small, vivid details of the everyday. Family with its ties, distances and complications lies at the centre of these compact narratives where potent memories of childhood lean up against the more vulnerable truths of grief and loss.

   — Jacqueline Saphra

 

Jill Abram’s Forgetting My Father is a graceful and controlled book about mourning and memory, weaving in its twin tributaries of culture and coming of age.

   — Roger Robinson

 

Jill Abram’s debut pamphlet is a series of beautifully wrought songs to her family, mini-voyages around their foibles and frailties. She is particularly good at framing a scene, then taking us into the moment that will become a memory, cherished or difficult, always indelible. As she unspools the lives of her parents and other relatives, it might look like ‘the chair stays empty’, but these delicately realised poems make sure it never really is.

   — Rishi Dastidar

 

About Jill Abram:

Jill Abram grew up in Manchester, travelled the world and now lives in Brixton. Her poems have been published widely and she has performed them across London and beyond, including at Ledbury, StAnza, and Verve Poetry Festivals and in Paris, New York, Chicago and online. She produces and presents a variety of poetry events, including the Stablemates series of poetry and conversation, and was Director of the influential collective Malika’s Poetry Kitchen for 12 years . jillabram.co.uk

Broken Sleep Books