poems of healing and transformation

Written by Geoffrey Philp for sx salon on Sunday, June 30th, 2024

In her debut collection of poems, Bath of Herbs, Emily Zobel Marshall uses carefully crafted imagery from English, Welsh, and Caribbean landscapes to explore heritage, identity, womanhood, grief, and healing. As with her previous books, Anansi’s Journey: A Story of Jamaican Cultural Resistance (2012) and American Trickster: Trauma Tradition and Brer Rabbit (2019), Marshall, a reader in cultural studies at Leeds Beckett University, weaves themes of resistance and resilience throughout the text.

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In Bath of Herbs, the rich, evocative language, sensory imagery, and at times intimate, confessional tone grounded in themes of resistance offers a powerful multigenerational therapeutic narrative and an invitation to the healing center of Marshall’s mythmaking.