Bath of Herbs

Emily Zobel Marshall spent her childhood in a remote village in the mountains of Snowdonia in North Wales with her Black Caribbean mother and white English father. Bath of Herbs is a beautifully crafted, honest and thoughtful first collection which explores the complexity of mixed-race, hybrid identities and relationships to the English and Welsh mountains, fells, rivers and shorelines from an ' othered', unmappable, positionality. Linking the whole is an engagement with the possibilities of healing: as in the bath of herbs in which her grandmother bathed her mother after giving birth; in the physicality of running and purificatory swimming in a river; in the care a hospital gives to her child and in the healing power of the natural world.