Kevin Pringle
The first poem I wrote about a patient was when I was working in Iowa City at the University of Iowa as a professor of Paediatric Surgery. Matt was a classmate of our younger daughter Fiona in Junior High (roughly equivalent to New Zealand’s Intermediate). He developed a tumour on one of his ribs, which I attempted to remove, unsuccessfully.
Bittersweet. Bitter more than sweet.
I did my best, and felt I let you down.”– from “Matt” by Kevin Pringle
[Read more…] about Swapping the scalpel for the pen: a surgeon writes
I knew he had died. Before reading the letters, I knew the end of his story. Sergeant Charles Leonard (Len) Hooper from Masterton, serving with the New Zealand Machine Gun Battalion on the Western Front, died in November 1918 in France just four days before the Armistice. His letters to his English fiancée, Elizabeth Sibthorp of Hornchurch – his ‘dearest Lizzie’ – are bundled in a grey folder loosely laced with thin white tape, held in the Imperial War Museum archive in London.
“Big Minty Nose” is one of six long poems that made up my book 
… we know you’re lying. I’ve been experiencing an awkward state of unease for close to 50 years now. And I hadn’t been able to put my finger on quite what it was until I heard an interview on Radio NZ National’s Nine to Noon programme. Lynn Freeman was talking with Harvard Business School social psychologist Amy Cuddy about body language, and especially about the significance of dissonance between words and actions.