Poetry - Corpus

“my wide white bed”: poems by Trish Harris

16 October 2017 Leave a Comment

Lynn Jenner

The hospital sails
like a tall ship
down the crease of the valley.
I am stabilised
mid-mast
laid out on a wide white bed
head facing east.

The first poem in my wide white bed, Trish Harris’s poetic memoir of an eight week stay in Lower Hutt Hospital, places her in bed, pinned out and pinned down. She is in pain, she has lots to worry about but she has a window to look out from and lots of company – sometimes more company than she would like. She can’t go anywhere or get out of bed. She can’t avoid the noises of peoples’ bodies and she can’t escape from her own body.

Metaphor and mental illness

18 September 2017 1 Comment

Heather Bauchop

I was meaning to write something about darkness and the health implications of street lights, but I’ve been swept away by Jay Griffiths’ 2016 memoir Tristimania: a diary of manic depression . Having previously read Griffiths’ Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time, I had meant to track down more of her writing, but had forgotten. It was a joyous surprise to find Tristimania on the Dunedin Public Library’s Book Bus.

An award-winning non-fiction writer, Griffiths recounts a harrowing year of illness with a prolonged episode of mixed-state hypomania (for which Griffiths prefers to use ‘manic depression’ or the older term ‘tristimania’).

‘Family History’: poems by Johanna Emeney

21 August 2017 Leave a Comment

Johanna Emeney

It’s poetry week in New Zealand, in the run-up to National Poetry Day on Friday 25 August. Here Auckland poet Johanna Emeney talks about the writing of her second poetry collection, Family History, which contains poetry written in response to her mother’s illness. Many of Emeney’s poems in this collection document the behaviour and language of healthcare professionals, and the impact of that on the quality of care received.

Family History grew from the creative component of my PhD. My thesis was essentially a study of autobiographical medical poetry written from the points of view of doctors, patients, carers and parents.

I knew that I wanted to explore constructs of identity and family in my own collection – how they are affected by illness and medical treatment. I also knew that I wanted to write about how it felt to be close to someone who was not being well cared for by medical professionals, and conversely, how it felt when a person in a healthcare role acted compassionately. In particular, I wanted to highlight how important the job of anyone in healthcare is, whether that person is a physician, hospital nurse, district nurse or liaison officer. Their warmth or coolness, their dedication or dispassion, makes a huge difference to the experience of the patient and his or her family.

‘Listening with my heart’: Poems by Aotearoa New Zealand nurses

24 July 2017 Leave a Comment

Miriam Vollweiler

By their involvement in the arts, whether poetry, painting, or writing novels, nurses and other health professionals have the opportunity to express a side of themselves which is not always possible in their day-to-day work. It is a creative way of reflecting and thinking about what they see and do and feel in their daily contact with patients.” – Lorraine Ritchie, editor of Listening with my Heart

The recently-launched book, Listening with my heart: Poems by Aotearoa New Zealand nurses, is the first anthology of poems by nurses to be published in Aotearoa-New Zealand. Edited by nurse and poet Lorraine Ritchie, with illustrations by Janet de Wagt, it contains poems selected from work submitted by nurses as part of a New Zealand Nurses Organisation’s ‘Visibility of Nursing’ project.

‘Alzheimer’s and a Spoon’: the nourishment of memory

10 July 2017 Leave a Comment

Sue Wootton

How can we use language to talk about not having language?”

This question held poet Liz Breslin in its grip for the several years it took to write the poems that appear in her first – terrific – collection. The book’s title, Alzheimer’s and a Spoon, encompasses the themes woven through the poems. On the one hand there is a beloved grandmother’s illness, and her gradual loss of memory and language through Alzheimer’s disease. On (or in) the other hand, there is a spoon, and all the nourishment implied by spoons and spooning: physical, emotional and spiritual.

Breslin’s collection probes the bonds between memory, language and identity. It explores a resonating question: What happens to the present and the future if we forget the past?

Medicine and poetry: the how, the why, and things of wonder

3 July 2017 2 Comments

Christina Grove

So we have come to the end of the first University Semester for 2017. For a third year medical student this means a welcome break from lectures, tests and cold flats. But this semester wasn’t only filled with facts to be learned and diseases to be understood.

In the first semester each third year med student chooses a Humanities selective. For six weeks we put down Robins Basic Pathology and pick up philosophy, the Book of Job or, in my case, a selection of poetry. The Poetry selective was taken by Dr Tom McLean from the Department of English and Linguistics, who helped us to analyse various forms of poetry, starting with sonnets and ending in a visit from “real life poet” Lynley Edmeades.