A Goareig patchwork quilt - Sara Louise Wheeler

This collection - written with an open kindness - let's you peep right inside the author's head and heart. As you're rummaging around you find thoughts and feelings and memories that are so familiar it'll make your eyes bulge.
There's no offer of life's answers, simply an honesty laid out like a buffet.
I'm so grateful to have bought this and will come back to it many times.

Even though I come from a different background to Sara, her battles to be accepted for being different really resonated with me and then the realisation that it's your friends and family who matter, not what strangers think. The annotations for Welsh references was also very helpful.

There is a special intimacy to this collection of poems by Sara Louise Wheeler. The quilt image in the title is perfect for the way that the tumble of memories, incidents and events from Wheeler’s life are brought together. The resulting confusion of intensity and emotion is such a delight.
Wheeler has long felt pushed to the outskirts of things and many of the poems here are driven by a search for identity. She writes of her Welsh grandfather, “you came to me / in a dream, to warn / that I was losing / myself, in a world / not meant for me - / and repressing my true self.” The essential nature of personal identity is illuminated in ‘A special day on Ivy Street’ when a community comes together to celebrate a christening. “A milestone in her spiritual life - / her special word given, her name spoken, / forever a symbol of her identity and answer / to the question: ‘Who are you?’”
Language has long been a troubling issue for Wheeler. She comes from a bilingual family and has always spoken Welsh. Yet her Welsh is considered by some to be ‘bratiaith’ – a debased adulterated language. The hurt that this continues to cause is rawly exposed in ‘The Non-Welsh woman, vol. 1-5’. “My old friend / cognitive dissonance / returns to torture me. / Who am I?”
But more than anything else, these are poems about the complex cherished relationships which Wheeler has with members of her family, past and present. She writes of a photograph from the 1960s of ‘Nain Llanrwst’ who had one blue eye and one brown eye. “I share this peculiarity now, / though more subtly, as my depigmentation progresses.” She writes of her paternal grandmother’s sister. “Beautiful through your lifetime, and your autumn, / although you never had a chance to marry; / I see you, Gwladys Ellen – strong woman.” And with particular pride, she writes of becoming Dodo (a colloquial term for aunty) to her two beloved nieces. “It changed me, once I knew / I had a role to fulfil, / and though I’ve failed, in many ways, / I have still, somehow, / Become Dodo.”
I know quilt-makers. They are driven people who are incapable of making just one. In that spirit, I fervently hope that ‘A Goareig patchwork quilt’ is merely the precursor of many others to follow.