Description
A Sudden Stitch. Unfruitful Land. A Fever.
In Milk & Moon-water, Milena Williamson uncovers 11 Old English metrical charms – ancient incantations spoken to ward off harm – creatively translating them into magical and medicinal spells for the modern reader.
Alongside each reimagining is an original charm poem, a remixed and new telling of an old text. Covering the climate crisis, illness, ageing and fertility, this collection of charms ranges from the incantatory to the unhinged, and reengages with the ancient practice of looking to the land and the body for answers to life’s new and persisting questions.
Milena Williamson is from Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. After receiving a BA in English literature and creative writing at Oberlin College in Ohio, she moved to Belfast. She has an MA and PhD in poetry, both from the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast. She lives in Belfast with her husband. She is the author of two previous poetry publications. Her debut pamphlet, Charm for Catching a Train, was published with Green Bottle Press in 2022. Her debut collection, Into the Night that Flies So Fast, was published with Dedalus Press in 2024. Her poems have appeared in The London Magazine, Oxford Poetry, The Stinging Fly, The Kenyon Review and more. In 2021, she received the Society of Authors’ Eric Gregory Award. In the same year, she received the Ireland Chair of Poetry Trust project award for her writing and research on Bridget Cleary, which became part of her first collection. In 2022, she received a support for the individual artists programme grant from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland for work that became this pamphlet.
Image credit: Stephanie Sy-Quia
Praise for Milk and Moon-water
“Williamson is a bold diviner of wild ritual, remedy, and witch-work. Her poems carry the scent of wolves and burning sage. Milk & Moon-water is a talismanic book—crafty, uncanny, starlit, and full of sass! Step across this threshold into a world where everything trembles with magic.” ~ Annemarie NĂ Churreáin
“These are such beautiful poems of land and the body, of fragility and strange strength, of deep echoes and resonances across time and translation.” ~ Han Smith
“Milk & Moon Water is a multi-faceted pamphlet that tugs on the thread of folk wisdom that connects us to our forebears. Expansive in its imaginative scope, and rich with vivid imagery, it draws the ancient and the modern together in a manner that reminds us of the continuums of life; of language; of our common humanity. Full of wit, intelligence, and hope, these translations and remixings of Old English show us what ekphrasis can be – a tuning into older frequencies still humming, a communion between the living and the dead.” ~ Jessica Traynor
“These clever, beautiful poems reimagine Old English charms with terrific wit and tenderness. Crackling with invention, Milk & Moon-water is a rare delight.” ~ Kate Wakeling
“A spellbinding reimagining of ancient rituals, Milk & Moon-water braids Old English charms with the crises of the present. Its beautiful spell-work translates acts of care like ploughing and planting into gestures of resistance and mourning. Williamson has conjured a wild little grimoire reminding us how to sing over wounds, scatter seeds, and name that which we cannot keep.” ~ Laura Theis
