The Icelandic poet, Gerður Kristný, has published
four collections of poetry with Arc, of which Seal
Mother is the most recent. Winner of the Icelandic
Women's Literature Prize 2023 and the Icelandic
Booksellers' Prize for Best Poetry book of 2022, Seal
Mother received universal praise upon publication.
This spellbinding sequence of poems tells the story
of the poet's great-great-grandmother, a midwife
who lived on the northernmost coast of Iceland at
the end of the nineteenth century. Drawing on the
classical forms of Icelandic poetry, Kristný paints
clear and simple pictures of the struggle for survival
by the woman and her family in a narrative that is
powerful and timeless.
Her three previous collections, Bloodhoof (2012),
Drápa (2018) and Reykjavík Requiem (2020) have
all appeared from Arc in Rory McTurk's translation.