Forgetting My Father is my debut pamphlet and is published by Broken Sleep Books.
Forgetting my Father is a poignant portrait of family life and a daughter’s bond with her ailing father. Jill Abram’s poetry is warm and gentle, keeping a space for the moment: “I remember Dad when he still remembered me”. She 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’.
You can pre-order a copy from the Broken Sleep Books website
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
Matthew Paul has written a post about the poem Inheritance from the pamphlet on his blog
Sue Wallace-Shaddad has reviewed Forgetting My Father for The Alchemy Spoon issue 10
Julia Webb has reviewed Forgetting My Father for Under the Radar issue 31
Diana Cant has reviewed Forgetting My Father for London Grip – read it here