Tag: poetry

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“The Built Moment” by Lavinia Greenlaw

Lavinia Greenlaw’s most recent poetry collection, The Built Moment is split into two sections, the first of which explores her father’s journey with dementia. The poems included are, in my opinion, some of the finest and most memorable writing about dementia I’ve come across whilst reading extensively on the subject. I’ve repeatedly found that poetry, with its use of white space, metaphor and resonant language provides a good vehicle through which to express some of the more difficult to quantify aspects of dementia. Greenlaw’s writing blew me away. 

There’s a warmth to these poems which reveals the relationship between the poet and her father and this often translates into a kind of desperation where the poet admits her own inability to help or arrest the progress of the illness, “I tell him I am saving him as quickly as I can.” There are even moments of genuine humour. I particularly enjoyed “The Finishing Line” where the poet’s brother, sitting at his father’s bedside, shares an anecdote about running a race dressed as a gorilla. It reminded me of the muddle and mixed emotions of tending to a much-loved family member’s illness where all the feelings sit close to the surface: sorrow, grief, and also joy. 

However, the thing I found most moving about The Built Moment was Greenlaw’s ability to pin down in words, the experiential side of dementia both from her own and her father’s perspective. It’s notoriously difficult -I know, I’ve tried- to write about an experience as strange as dementia when it isn’t something you’ve been through yourself in your own mind and body. Greenlaw uses evasive, slippery, meandering phrases and words to effectively convey how it must feel to be present and also becoming absent at the same time. “My father has lost his way out of the present./ Something is stopping him leaving, nothing becomes/ the immediate past.” One poem is called “My father has no shadow” and another, “While he can still speak,” in which he talks to his hands and legs as he gets dressed, suggesting he now sits at some distance from his own self. 

It’s the use of language which has had me returning to this collection repeatedly over the last year or so. Greenlaw more than most writers I’ve come across is using words to say the unsayable. She does so with a masterful lightness of touch.

The Built Moment was published by Faber & Faber in 2019

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Book Reviews

“The Boiling Point for Jam” by Lynda Tavakoli

The Boiling Point for Jam is Northern Ireland-based poet, Lynda Tavakoli’s debut collection. It covers a wide range of themes including war, personal loss, ageing, the natural world and Tavakoli’s connection to both Fermanagh and Tehran. The poems are both assured and characterised by a lightness of touch which often had me re-reading lines a second and third time as an image or metaphor slowly impacted with devastating effect.

The collection begins with a handful of poems which explore both her mother’s experience of dementia and her memories of her parents. The second poem in the collection, “Dead Dog” shows her mother distinctly unimpressed by a stuffed dog which has been brought in to the residential care unit to amuse the residents living with dementia, 

‘That’s a dead dog,’ you say,

The words raged from that part of you

Still holding and holding on.

It’s shot through with dark humour and Tavakoli’s signature unswerving gaze. Small, deft touches such as the repetition of the line, how you love my coat/and how you love my coat, reveal her ability to not only capture snapshots of her mother’s life with dementia, but also place those moments under an analytical poet’s gaze. There’s both beauty and profundity to be found next to the deep sadness inherent within these poems. Lines like,

this posse of souls,

eyes-eternity filled already,

struck be as both deeply upsetting and also incredibly poignant. Tavakoli tackles her subject with a great deal of respect and a sense of shared humanity. The poems which deal explicitly with her mother’s dementia are interspersed and set beside poems exploring her memories of both her parents, so the reader gets a real sense of the fondness which exists between the poet and her mother and the deep connection they have. When, in “Is This What I Do” she writes,

I say your name, see the reluctant

wakening of your eyes, the disappointment

you had not slept your way to heaven.

You have told me this before.

there is no judgment of her mother’s despair, no sense that they are meeting as anything but equals. It is the way Tavakoli records her mother as suffering, but not diminished as a person, which really struck me as I read these poems. I found them incredibly moving and would gladly have read quite a few more. 

The Boiling Point for Jam was published by Arlen House in 2020 

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“Alzheimer’s and a Spoon” by Liz Breslin

Alzheimer’s and a Spoon – Liz Breslin

In New Zealand-based poet Liz Breslin’s first full collection she turns her attention to her own grandmother’s experience with Dementia. Her Polish babcia, Manuela was a devout Catholic, a soldier in the Warsaw uprising and an incredibly interesting women. In these 75 short poems Breslin documents her life, her experience of Alzheimer’s and her death. She includes several poems based on the research and case notes of Alois Alzheimer, the German psychiatrist and neuropathologist credited with first discovering the disease. 

Peppered with photographs illustrating parts of her grandmother’s story and intriguingly shaped word poems, the collection isn’t afraid to play with form. Snippets from recorded interviews with Breslin’s grandmother are woven into the poetry, whilst in other places, Alzheimer’s own notes are presented as found poems. As the poet skips from one form to the other, dipping in and out of found text, thoughts, narrative and impression she effectively conveys a feeling of confusion and disorientation; a most fitting evocation for a poetry collection concerned with exploring the experience of Dementia. There’s a sense here of language and narrative falling apart; “where are they off to, these words/ I am losing?” 

However, Breslin’s main focus is the gradual erosion of her grandmother’s memory. I was particularly impressed by the variety of metaphors and images she uses to express this gradual loss. In Eulogy at the Oxford Oratory, memory is powerfully and tenderly equated with a set of her grandmother’s rosary beads. 

“Warm with memory, some will

spill. Some I’ll keep in corners,

hidden glimmers. Much has been lost.”

Alzheimer’s and a Spoon is an honest, warm and occasionally funny look at what it’s like to watch a loved one forget their own past. It explores issues of culture, distance, language  and history through the lens of Dementia. There’s a big life and a lot of story tucked between the lines of Breslin’s short poems. When, at the beginning of dichotomy, she writes,

“Please pass me a scrumpled ball through the bars

secret me the memories you don’t speak

I hear the whispers of your stalwart war

but never from your tongue, never for real

it’s just stories, right?”

Breslin gives us a little insight into the mammoth task she’s set herself; telling the story of a woman who can no longer tell her own story.

Alzheimer’s and a Spoon was published by Otago University Press in 2017 

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Book Reviews

“The Hard Word Box” by Sarah Hesketh

In 2013, the English poet Sarah Hesketh spent a period of almost five months visiting residents in a residential care home for people living with dementia. She wrote about her experiences, her encounters and the lives of the people she met in this series of moving and evocative poems. The poems are poignant, funny, compassionate and shot through with wonderful insights into how difficult it is to convey the fullness of a person when language and communication begins to fail. Each of the poems is an exercise in bridging the gap between sense and confusion, language and silence, loss and the richness of humanity. The poems included in The Hard Word Box aren’t just clever and inventive. They’re also beautiful pieces of writing which linger long after reading.

The collection begins with a short essay in which Hesketh explains her process, her findings and the ethics she employed in approaching such a complex project. Her warmth and respect for the residents comes across strongly. The poems which resulted from her visits vary in length and form. Some are observational. Some read like prose poem interviews between the poet and the residents. Others contain verbatim phrases lifted from conversations with the residents. Hesketh shapes her own words around these comments so it feels as if the poem is being co-authored and the person living with dementia is being allowed to voice their thoughts instead of just being talked about.

Doreen has a good sense of humour.

Doreen can be a bit rude sometimes (BE GOOD BECAUSE WE
HAVE NO MORE) but staff help her with this.

  • From “Doreen”

Playful wording and humour abounds in poems like “Phyllis’ Instructions for Sex.” Whilst other poems offer a stunning articulation of suffering, grief and loss, rendered in a way which allows the reader to empathise with the residents. “Please don’t ask us to speak/ the hard words all at once.” In other poems Hesketh uses fractured language, line breaks and jarring metaphors to explore the relationship between communication and silence, and the difficulty of voicing people who are losing their own ability to speak.

Everything is so

balled heart. Too much muscle

     in the sound of thinking.

All we want is to be allowed

to be gone.

                                           To fall from this dark like

                brushed white chalk.

  • From “Into the White”

The Hard Work Box is a powerful and incredibly moving testament to a long community arts engagement project. It is a ground-breaking piece of writing when it comes to exploring the relationship between the person living with dementia and the artist attempting to record their experience. There’s a collaborative element present here which is often neglected in poems and stories about dementia. It is clear from reading Hesketh’s work that listening was just as important as speaking when it came to capturing the residents in the entirety of who they are. This emphasis on a holistic present tense understanding of the person living with dementia is eloquently and compassionately expressed in her introduction. 

When I first started working on ‘Where the Heart Is’ I thought my job would be like that of an archaeologist. That I would help people to recover who they had been, and explore new ways to hang on to that. Instead, I realized what was most important, was not that Maureen used to like jazz, or that Bill had once been a butcher, but that Jack tells great jokes, Phyllis likes helping others to the table- that’s who these people are now.

The Hard Word Box was published by Penned in the Margins in 2014