Latest news with #poetry
BBC News
3 hours ago
- Health
- BBC News
Somerset hospice nurse releases poetry book about patient stories
A hospice nurse has written a book of poetry based on emotional and inspiring patient Durman, who works at St Margaret's Hospice in Taunton, Somerset, said she uses poetry as an outlet to help "keep the emotional burnout at bay".The 39-year-old said writing was not only cathartic for her, but served as a "tribute and testament" to the grieving families she supports."Every shift we work kind of builds up in us," she said. "That's why I'm so glad to have poetry to be able to express those feelings and write them down." Her book, Ghosts of Nightshifts Past, will be launched at Brendan Books in Taunton on Thursday. Ms Durman originally studied for a degree in writing, but "wanted a change of pace" after moving to the UK from the US in 2011."I just felt I had something to give people and I wanted to help," she told BBC Radio began her career in the "fast-paced and challenging" wards of the emergency department at Musgrove Hospital, but soon turned her attention towards end-of-life care."It is really hard to detach emotionally. For better or for worse, I don't think nurses leave their work at work," Ms Durman explained."I always say sometimes poetry flows like water, and sometimes it feels like you're pulling your insides out to put them on the page."Everyone has different ways of keeping the emotional burnout at bay, and this is mine." One of her poems, 'her husband, next of kin', follows a man who watches helplessly as his wife slips away."The joy is really making connections with other healthcare workers, patients and other poets," Ms Durman said."Them finding the beauty in what I have written, it's incredible. It's truly humbling."
The Guardian
16 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Empire of Forgetting by John Burnside review – last words from an essential poet of our age
John Burnside died in May 2024, aged 69. In life, he was almost preternaturally prolific. He started late – his debut, The Hoop, didn't appear until he was in his early 30s – but with that first poetry collection a dam was breached; over the next three and a half decades, he published at the rate of nearly a book a year. His output was eclectic: 17 collections were interspersed with novels (notable among them the ravishing A Summer of Drowning, set in far-north Norway under a luminescent midnight sun) and a trio of bleached and harrowing memoirs that laid bare the catastrophe and disintegration of his early life. But he was a poet first and foremost, a poet in his heart. To read his poetry is to feel, just for a moment, as if the world's edges have been pushed back; as if, by standing beside him, you too can see further and more clearly. The shock of his final collection isn't that it exists; it's no surprise at all to hear him from beyond the grave. Rather, it's the realisation that, after the astonishing generosity of these last decades, what we have in our hands really are his final words. It's our great good fortune, then, that Burnside's closing work is also one of his finest. The poems are few in number – just 19 – but there's no impression, often present in posthumous collections, of a structure hastily assembled out of ill-fitting parts. In fact, The Empire of Forgetting is marked both by its coherence – thematic, imagistic and linguistic – and a sense of its fitness. These are poems that deal directly and almost exclusively with mortality. This isn't, of course, new territory for Burnside: his poetry has always been death-haunted, peopled with ghosts. But here the focus has shifted, from the general (loss, religion, afterlife, decay) to the specific. The whole collection is an anticipation of, a grappling with, his own death: 'the darkness-to-come'. In a handful of the poems, he appears to meet the matter head-on. Last Days, with its mentions of 'hospice' and funereal 'white chrysanthemums', offers a vision of 'starlight at the far end of the ward / where time has stopped, the way it sometimes stops / in theatres, when the actors leave the stage'. A little further on, in As If from the End Times, he picks up the word 'last' (which sounds like a bell throughout the collection) and weaves it through the poem, most plangently in the elegiac central stanza, which describes 'Last day of birdsong; salt rain in the trees; / the echo of someone going about / their business, making good or making hay / – you never know for sure, although you know / that something here is coming to an end'. But for the most part, his impending mortality is considered more obliquely, through the twin lenses, familiar to Burnside-watchers, of nature (damaged, depleted, but still sublime) and memory. It is memory – and its shadow, forgetting – to which Burnside keeps circling back in this collection, the space that it takes up here offering a clear and poignant mirror of the space it takes up in our lives as we move past middle age. His mother and father, both frequent presences in his work, take the stage again: the former a locus of endless longing; the latter a baleful 'trail / of Players No 6 and coal-tar soap'. Burnside's writing, particularly in his memoirs, is dominated by his father's bitter legacy, but as he himself draws nearer to the end, it is his mother to whom he turns. In the heart-catching title poem, he leans into poetry's ability to efface time, locating the pair of them in a soft-lit, sweet-scented version of his childhood. 'What if my mother walked home in the grey of morning, one last day', he writes, going on to imagine a reunion that is almost epiphanic, a 'momentary // halcyon of everyone / together, voices, singsong in the dark'. To Burnside the afterlife isn't a voyaging out, but a voyaging in: a route back into the lost past. And this past, when he conjures it, is marked by its externality: it's not the houses and furniture of memory that he craves, but the seasons, the 'evening dusk', the 'quince, or damson, strafed into the grass', 'the field where, once, / we played Dead Man's Fall'. The purity and clarity of nature in the past is counterpointed by the present: 'a ruined / thicket, sump oil / rotting in the grass, a spill / of Roundup in a rut of mud and dock'. This is the Burnside we know: attentive to the degradation of nature; staring it in the face and obliging us to stare at it, too. But in his final collection, more often than not, it's the beauty that possesses him. These are poems filled with songbirds, orchards, 'birch woods', litanies of flowers ('foxgloves, purple / loosestrife, sprawls / of clematis'). The weather is beneficent: sunlight filters, snow drifts and blankets, frost 'performs its secret ministry', there's the sound of 'small rain in the leaves'. The world we see here, through the eyes of a poet at the end of his life, is almost unbearably beautiful – which makes the leave-taking unbearable too. At the heart of the collection is The Memory Wheel, in which Burnside imagines his way into death, and in doing so comes close to writing an epitaph for himself. The poem concludes on the image of a memory: of 'those mornings / when we shivered from our beds / and lit a fire / to magnify the dark'. If Burnside's poetry – all his writing, but his poetry most powerfully of all – can be summed up, it might be like this: a bright light, an illumination that, in its beauty, reveals the depth of the darkness that surrounds us. It's impossible not to love the world more when reading Burnside, and impossible not to be more scared and saddened while doing so. He was the ideal laureate of our age, painfully alive to the glory of what we're losing. Now we've lost him, our Anthropocene spirit guide. A light has gone out. The Empire of Forgetting by John Burnside is published by Jonathan Cape (£13). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Empire of Forgetting by John Burnside review – last words from an essential poet of our age
John Burnside died in May 2024, aged 69. In life, he was almost preternaturally prolific. He started late – his debut, The Hoop, didn't appear until he was in his early 30s – but with that first poetry collection a dam was breached; over the next three and a half decades, he published at the rate of nearly a book a year. His output was eclectic: 17 collections were interspersed with novels (notable among them the ravishing A Summer of Drowning, set in far-north Norway under a luminescent midnight sun) and a trio of bleached and harrowing memoirs that laid bare the catastrophe and disintegration of his early life. But he was a poet first and foremost, a poet in his heart. To read his poetry is to feel, just for a moment, as if the world's edges have been pushed back; as if, by standing beside him, you too can see further and more clearly. The shock of his final collection isn't that it exists; it's no surprise at all to hear him from beyond the grave. Rather, it's the realisation that, after the astonishing generosity of these last decades, what we have in our hands really are his final words. It's our great good fortune, then, that Burnside's closing work is also one of his finest. The poems are few in number – just 19 – but there's no impression, often present in posthumous collections, of a structure hastily assembled out of ill-fitting parts. In fact, The Empire of Forgetting is marked both by its coherence – thematic, imagistic and linguistic – and a sense of its fitness. These are poems that deal directly and almost exclusively with mortality. This isn't, of course, new territory for Burnside: his poetry has always been death-haunted, peopled with ghosts. But here the focus has shifted, from the general (loss, religion, afterlife, decay) to the specific. The whole collection is an anticipation of, a grappling with, his own death: 'the darkness-to-come'. In a handful of the poems, he appears to meet the matter head-on. Last Days, with its mentions of 'hospice' and funereal 'white chrysanthemums', offers a vision of 'starlight at the far end of the ward / where time has stopped, the way it sometimes stops / in theatres, when the actors leave the stage'. A little further on, in As If from the End Times, he picks up the word 'last' (which sounds like a bell throughout the collection) and weaves it through the poem, most plangently in the elegiac central stanza, which describes 'Last day of birdsong; salt rain in the trees; / the echo of someone going about / their business, making good or making hay / – you never know for sure, although you know / that something here is coming to an end'. But for the most part, his impending mortality is considered more obliquely, through the twin lenses, familiar to Burnside-watchers, of nature (damaged, depleted, but still sublime) and memory. It is memory – and its shadow, forgetting – to which Burnside keeps circling back in this collection, the space that it takes up here offering a clear and poignant mirror of the space it takes up in our lives as we move past middle age. His mother and father, both frequent presences in his work, take the stage again: the former a locus of endless longing; the latter a baleful 'trail / of Players No 6 and coal-tar soap'. Burnside's writing, particularly in his memoirs, is dominated by his father's bitter legacy, but as he himself draws nearer to the end, it is his mother to whom he turns. In the heart-catching title poem, he leans into poetry's ability to efface time, locating the pair of them in a soft-lit, sweet-scented version of his childhood. 'What if my mother walked home in the grey of morning, one last day', he writes, going on to imagine a reunion that is almost epiphanic, a 'momentary // halcyon of everyone / together, voices, singsong in the dark'. To Burnside the afterlife isn't a voyaging out, but a voyaging in: a route back into the lost past. And this past, when he conjures it, is marked by its externality: it's not the houses and furniture of memory that he craves, but the seasons, the 'evening dusk', the 'quince, or damson, strafed into the grass', 'the field where, once, / we played Dead Man's Fall'. The purity and clarity of nature in the past is counterpointed by the present: 'a ruined / thicket, sump oil / rotting in the grass, a spill / of Roundup in a rut of mud and dock'. This is the Burnside we know: attentive to the degradation of nature; staring it in the face and obliging us to stare at it, too. But in his final collection, more often than not, it's the beauty that possesses him. These are poems filled with songbirds, orchards, 'birch woods', litanies of flowers ('foxgloves, purple / loosestrife, sprawls / of clematis'). The weather is beneficent: sunlight filters, snow drifts and blankets, frost 'performs its secret ministry', there's the sound of 'small rain in the leaves'. The world we see here, through the eyes of a poet at the end of his life, is almost unbearably beautiful – which makes the leave-taking unbearable too. At the heart of the collection is The Memory Wheel, in which Burnside imagines his way into death, and in doing so comes close to writing an epitaph for himself. The poem concludes on the image of a memory: of 'those mornings / when we shivered from our beds / and lit a fire / to magnify the dark'. If Burnside's poetry – all his writing, but his poetry most powerfully of all – can be summed up, it might be like this: a bright light, an illumination that, in its beauty, reveals the depth of the darkness that surrounds us. It's impossible not to love the world more when reading Burnside, and impossible not to be more scared and saddened while doing so. He was the ideal laureate of our age, painfully alive to the glory of what we're losing. Now we've lost him, our Anthropocene spirit guide. A light has gone out. The Empire of Forgetting by John Burnside is published by Jonathan Cape (£13). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
CBC
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- CBC
Remembering Andrea Gibson
Arts ·Commotion Artists Alessandra Naccarato and Syrus Marcus Ware honour the poet's legacy Social Sharing Andrea Gibson was a celebrated poet and spoken word artist who wrote about love, queerness and death. They recently passed away from ovarian cancer. Today on Commotion, host Elamin Abdelmahmoud speaks with poet Alessandra Naccarato and artist and activist Syrus Marcus Ware about Gibson's impact on poetry and culture at large.
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Poem of the week: Salt, Snow, Earth by Naomi Foyle
Salt, Snow, Earth Salt bites Snow. Snow slaps Earth. Earth pounds Salt. And so it goes, on and on and on round and round in every shade of hand — claw-teeth, hard palm, fist — Salt, Snow, Earth, Snow, Earth, Salt Bite, Slap, Pound. Slap, Pound, Bite A game to get the blood up. Heart pumping. Skin singing. No breath or time to ask Whose bodies are blanketed? Whose bodies blanked out? What are the odds white wins? Salt & Snow is the title of Naomi Foyle's latest poetry collection. If they haven't done so already, some judging committee somewhere should shortlist it for a significant prize. Impressively varied and agile in form, international in scope, Salt & Snow is as emotionally rich as it is politically alert, drawing strength from its predominant genre, the elegy. The 'in memoriam' poems lament both individuals known privately to the poet, and public 'names' including author and art critic John Berger, poet Lee Harwood and US police murder victim George Floyd. There is no significant difference in Foyle's approach: what particularly distinguishes all the elegies is the depth of imaginative empathy brought to bear on the various lives and deaths. Foyle, who has recovered from cancer, writes not only from the awareness of death as an individual tragedy, especially when 'untimely', but as the common prospect of all organisms. Her visionary prose poem The Dark Earth concludes its life-enhancing list of fruits and flowers, and how to cultivate and eat them, with their horrific metamorphosis into dangerous threats: 'Should they persist, hack with knives and machetes, chop down and string up, beat with bats, iron bars, hurl from tall towers, crush, burn, behead. Ditch their remains in the earth you call dirt.' This poem has an unusual dedication: 'i.m. all those cut down due to their nature' and it expresses another essential theme of the collection, the political creation of the enemy who justifies the forces of destruction. This week's poem adds 'earth' to the 'salt' and 'snow' of the title and the title poem. The latter is one of the 'public' elegies, written in memory of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes, the child who was 'poisoned with salt' by his mother and whose death became an impossible subject of conversation: 'Our silence / is a coverlet / of snow // on a looted grave – // white as salt.' These images are scattered across the book's main section. Salt is especially significant and takes various forms: it's the ammonium nitrate ('that white synthetic salt') which exploded with devastating effect in a Beirut warehouse on 4 August 2020, and also a vital ingredient in the 'bottle of Tajín' which George Floyd's ex-girlfriend was keeping for the meal they hoped to share on their 'first post-lockdown meet-up'. Snow, Salt, Earth initially enacts a process of stripping down. The symbolic substances are introduced in brief sentences, stating the effect of one upon the other, anaphora emphasising the chant of a 'game'. The effects are not necessarily negative: salt is useful for melting snow, snow may 'slap' earth without destroying it, salt is vitally important to life. But the implicit metaphor of a relentless game develops in the tercet: 'And so it goes, on and on and on / round and round in every shade of hand …' The hand then shape-shifts into various weapons: '— claw-teeth' (suggesting the cruelty of fingernails), 'hard palm, fist —'. Now syntax is abandoned: the pace accelerates as the couplet divides, as if in a battle with itself, into a line of nouns and a line of verbs, percussive monosyllables belted out like punches. If this were a sonnet (I'm leaving the interpretation open), verse three would mark an upheaval of a 'turn'. Subsequently the speaker, perhaps not wholly ironically, shows violence becoming exciting and addictive. Words are put together again, though not yet as full sentences: 'A game to get the blood up. / Heart pumping. Skin singing.' Formal grammar restored, the questions there will be 'no breath or time to ask' occupy the final tercet. It makes a clear distinction between the snow that 'blankets' and somehow comforts a surface, and the snow that erases it, 'blanks' it. That surface implicitly becomes a scene of annihilation: it may be a political arena in which the crimes of a state against its people are concealed and those who ask questions are disappeared. As if exhausted by what it has enacted, the poem now seems to drop a tone in pitch, into the angry sarcasm of despair: 'What are the odds white wins?' The whiteness left on the page provides the only answer to the question. I was struck by the uncanny prescience of that line when I re-read the collection a few months ago. It was coincidentally after I'd watched the video of the confrontation between presidents Zelenskyy and Trump over the future of Ukraine. Trump had told Zelenskyy, 'You don't have the cards right now', and Zelenskyy replied: 'We're not playing cards.' 'You're gambling with World War Three,' Trump insisted. The memory of that snarling battle over a familiar metaphor immediately rose in my mind when I re-read Salt, Snow, Earth, giving the poem's conclusion a strong additional thrust. This resonance persists with the daily reminders of the 'gambling' element in missile-strikes, for instance, which are often not as predictable as claimed. The line has a further significance as a reminder of the 'supremacist' racial assumptions behind war. Salt, Snow, Earth has been re-imagined as the compelling 'poemfilm' below in a collaboration between Razia Aziz, Wendy Pye and the poet herself. Their work combines exciting vocal and instrumental sounds, brilliantly woven imagery and some stunning physical theatre.
