ABSTRACT
This chapter explores ultrasound poetry, a literary genre that Clanchy identifies not only as a response to ultrasound technology, but also as a cultural phenomenon. This claim is borne out by a corpus of ultrasound poems by many contemporary British women poets, including Clanchy. Close analysis of ultrasound poems by Jamie, Flynn, Dunmore, and Wood, the chapter provides ultrasound poetry as a narrative of motherhood that responds to the cultural and medical discourses generated by the ultrasound foetal image, including contemporary feminist analysis. The chapter highlights ultrasound poetry and the pregnant poetic voice as important components of contemporary British poetry and as instructive subjects for motherhood-studies scholars. Ultrasound poetry responds to this narrative by experimenting with space imagery, thereby showcasing both the foetal spaceman and the maternal space inhabits. The process of ultrasound scanning translates sound waves into images, the ultrasound poem 'scans' ultrasound into poetic language – imagery, rhythm, metre – giving voice, crucially, to maternal subjectivity.
