IN THE WET-AIRED TRENCHES OF THE TUBE I WAS

Mothersong, Amy Acre’s debut collection, takes readers through the frightening, wearying, ecstatic experience of becoming a mother. It ends with a poem that casts the moment of birth itself as a spiritual vision (“her head like god / cracking / a rock”), but begins here, in the sweaty depths of the London Underground, transformed into an urban jungle in the eyes of the anxious poet, a “tigress” on the lookout for any potential threat to her “cub”.

Its rough, unsettled rhythm – very loose pentameter, for the most part – adds to the atmosphere of lurching paranoia. A primal fear (what if I drop my daughter?) is only alleviated by the sight of other parents going through the same thing (“[I] wondered if / they too saw their babies fall”); it helps to know you’re not alone.

“I wrote this poem from the peak of postnatal anxiety, when I felt like an animal,” Acre tells me. “The tube was a major site of this anxiety – it amazed me how this mundane part of daily life had been transformed into a kind of firewalk, but this is one of the great surprises of parenthood: in both wonderful and devastating ways, everything you thought you knew is transmogrified.”

Tristram Fane Saunders a tigress, cub in jaw, sniffing out cordite and saltpetre, spying warshapes in the dark. I saw the parched black mouth of the track, a long, marauding animal, limbless slither, crabapple on tongue. My child, months from the womb, hung from my teeth. I ferried her by the neck and saw her death everywhere. I hung on the grit-kissed wall until the train pummelled in to replace imagination. Forgive me, I saw things I couldn’t tell my therapist. I mauled thought to silence and counted my steps and talked to myself in dissertation. I saw others, smelt their milk in the slow lifts, smiled at their litters and wondered if they too saw their babies fall, if they fought escalators tumbling with fear, if we were all staring down the same muzzle, waiting for the grip to drop from our own hands.