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Inside My Mother

96 pages
Paperback, 21 x 14.8 cm
Published July 2015
ISBN 9781922146885

Inside My Mother

Ali Cobby Eckermann

Winner of the Windham Campbell Prize

In her memoir Too Afraid to Cry, published in 2013, Indigenous poet Ali Cobby Eckermann related how she had been tricked away from her mother as a baby, repeating the trauma her mother had suffered when she was taken from her grandmother many years before. Eckermann in turn had to give her own child up for adoption. In her new poetry collection, Inside My Mother, she explores the distance between the generations created by such experiences, felt as an interminable void in its darkest aspects, marked by sadness, withdrawal, yearning and mistrust, but in other ways a magical place ‘beyond the imagination’, lit by dreams and visions of startling intensity, populated by symbolic presences and scenes of ritual and commemoration, chief amongst them the separation and reunion of mother and child. Though the emotions are strong, they are expressed simply and with a sense of significance in nature which reminds one of the poetry of Oodgero Noonuccal, whose successor Eckermann is.

WINNER: Windham-Campbell Prize 2017
COMMENDED: Kate Challis RAKA Award 202

About the Author

Ali Cobby Eckermann

Ali Cobby Eckermann’s first collections of poetry little bit long time and Kami (2010) both quickly sold out their first print runs. Her second verse novel Ruby Moonlight won the 2013 NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry and Book of the Year Award. In 2017, Ali won the Windham-Campbell prize.

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Interviews

The Guardian: ‘Ali Cobby Eckermann on winning the world’s richest writing prize: “It’s taken time to adjust”’

The Compulsive Reader: ‘Ali Cobby Eckermann on her book Inside my Mother’

Red Room Poetry: ‘Ali Cobby Eckermann: Inside my Mother

SMH – Windham-Campbell

Adelaide Advertiser – Windham-Campbell

Educational Resources

Red Room Poetry: HSC English Resource

Reading Australia: HSC English Resource

 

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