Full Description
How might poetry help us articulate the body in illness, in work, and in love? Tiffany Atkinson's fourth collection includes the prize-winning sequence 'Dolorimeter', which takes fragments of speech and found text from a hospital residency to pay homage to the inventiveness and humour of patients and staff in a series of meditations on the notion that pain resists language. Away from the wards, other poems consider the strangeness of the workplace and the embarrassing incursions of desire into everyday life, celebrating the ability of poetic language to lay awkwardness and uncertainty alongside unexpected openings and glimpses of revelation. A lumen is a unit of light, but also a channel or an opening inside the body; perhaps, in this collection, it may also serve as a metaphor for the work of the poem itself. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
Contents
I Dolorimeter: 19 readings
11 /ˌdɒləˈrɪmɪtə/
12 Table 8.1: What makes patients anxious about gastroscopy
14 Heroin works
15 Found poem I
17 Accident & Emergency
19 Song of a pain
20 McGill Pain Questionnaire (annotated) please tick
21 Mr Broad's morphine
23 Neuropathy
25 SOCRATES
27 Found poem II
28 A Biblical pain & an aside on bedside manner
30 Pranidhana
31 A line from the doctor (annotated)
32 Clean windows
34 A bad cold
35 Signs of the body: longitudinal sample at tea break
36 Last
38 The smokers outside Bronglais hospital
II
41 You can't go there
50 The heart it's true looks jaunty
51 Walking with Virginia
52 In this class
53 Mantras
54 The department of small arts
55 Consent
56 Dear Sam
57 It is a very gracious hotel
58 Workshop
59 Panels
60 There is no sexual relation
61 Hymn
62 Dog speaks
63 Categories of experience c. 2016
64 The poem Kolkata
65 Wire-seller, Lal-Bazar
66 Kalighat
67 Yoga
68 Parable
69 Postscript
70 21 points for a feminist essay on film
72 Burgeon
73 Neighbour
74 Experiment
76 Eggshell
79 Notes
