Poetry - Corpus

Tools of the Trade

20 June 2016 Leave a Comment

Dr Lesley Morrison

On the bookmark inside Tools of the Trade, a little pocket book of poems for new doctors, is a poem by the doctor poet Gael Turnbull, ‘Lines for a Bookmark’:

You who read..
May you seek
As you look;
May you keep
What you need;
May you care
What you choose;
And know here
In this book
Something strange,
Something sure,
That will change
You and be yours.

Gael Turnbull, from There Are Words: Collected poems (Shearsman Press, 2006), by permission of the author’s Estate.

This was and is very much our aspiration for this project, to enhance the experience of being a new doctor, and to provide a comforting, supporting and illuminating friend.

[Read more…] about Tools of the Trade

Poetry and memory: Alzheimer’s and a spoon

Some people process the world through paycheques, others through the haircuts on their neighbours, or the shoes they look down at or the latest thing the Internet says. As a writer I process relentlessly through words and words and words.

So when my grandmother, on the other side of the world, started her decline into Alzheimer’s, it was her language, or rather, the sudden and marked change in it, that drew me in to the pathos of her story. She’d grown up speaking Polish, using English as a second language and England as a refuge at the conclusion of the Second World War. Her English disappeared first, fast. Her Polish came forth, lingered.

Speaking wordlessly

13 June 2016 2 Comments

Huberta Hellendoorn

To communicate does not always mean using spoken words, as the development of sign language shows. But I want to write about our experience with art and non-spoken communication.

In 1962 our daughter, Miriam, was born with Down syndrome. Our feelings of disappointment and sadness were soon replaced by a determination to fill her life (and ours) with challenges that would prepare her for as normal a future as was possible. And she did have that normal life. Although she was born too early to take part in mainstreaming she stood out in all her schooling activities, and, later on, in different employment situations. In 1989 Miriam went to a course at the Mosgiel Abilities Resource Centre to learn independence skills. At the end of the course the teacher asked me, “Did you know Miriam has a talent for painting?”

[Read more…] about Speaking wordlessly

An oasis from anxiety

6 June 2016 Leave a Comment

Ruth Arnison

Spring, summer, autumn, winter: four times a year Ruth Arnison distributes 8000 brightly-coloured cards to medical waiting rooms, hospices, rest homes and prisons throughout most of New Zealand. She is the founder and editor of the Dunedin-based charity Poems in the Waiting Room (NZ). But why place poetry in a waiting room? People hatee poetry, right? Wrong. The poetry cards have proved extremely popular. Arnison once received an email which sums up why: Although I am not a person who gravitates toward poetry, after I read the selection of poems, I noticed I had been given an oasis from anxiety and had been briefly removed from our present situation.

How can a poem—a few words strung together on a few lines—be an oasis? Ruth Arnison explains: [Read more…] about An oasis from anxiety

Ink under the doctor’s fingernails

6 June 2016 1 Comment

Dr John Holmes

Letterpress printing. What images do you get from these two words? I immediately think of type, lead, paper, dirty hands and black ink under the fingernails. You would not expect a doctor to have dirty hands and ink under the fingernails. When I was a medical student I was given a small hand printing press, some type and other necessary equipment. I bought a very helpful book, Printing for Pleasure, which was first published in the Teach Yourself series by the English Universities Press in the late 1950s. I have been learning and practising letterpress printing ever since. [Read more…] about Ink under the doctor’s fingernails

Muses and marble

30 May 2016 Leave a Comment

At the age of nine, Jamie Trower suffered a traumatic brain injury. He spent months in a coma, and two subsequent years living in the Wilson Centre in Auckland undergoing rehabilitation. In 2015 he published Anatomy, a powerful collection of poetry which chronicles his changed life. Jamie explains how entering the ‘separate cosmos’ of poetry helped him find a way home to himself. [Read more…] about Muses and marble