Edited by Lavinia Greenlaw
Published by Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation
Price: £8.50 | Paperback | ISBN: 1 903080 09 2 | 208pp
Publication Date: 1 May 2007
Finding the poetry in medicine…
In 2005 Lavinia Greenlaw was poet-in-residence at the Royal Society of Medicine, where she commissioned some of Britain’s leading poets, asking them to choose the medical condition that most interested them, and then found specialist clinicians or medical researchers for them to collaborate with. The results – 22 new poems from some of the UK’s finest writers – are published in Signs and Humours: The poetry of medicine, a new anthology from the Gulbenkian Foundation.
The anthology brings together 100 poems written over the last 2,000 years to show how one of the most basic human concerns – the body – has continued to fascinate and agitate poets. Whether it’s Horace complaining about garlic playing havoc with his digestive system, Grey Gowrie recovering from a heart transplant or Jo Shapcott demonstrating – a lack of – latent inhibition, the anthology explores the questions that arise when we are forced to stop and consider our physical selves.
‘I have endeavoured to show how the same experience and questions, the same confounding sensations, have been part of the poet’s engagement with the physical self for thousands of years,’ says Lavinia Greenlaw, who edited the anthology. ‘So here is Thomas Hardy admiring the persistence of genes, and, two thousand years apart, Lucretius and Richard Price contemplating sleep.’
The 22 specially commissioned poems include deliberations on the pathologies of our time, from autism and infertility to pancreatitis and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but often take the subject matter in unexpected directions. In ‘The Origins of Malaria’ Ruth Padel explores the behaviour of the malaria parasite in the system of the mosquito and humans as if it were a ‘sort of sci fi parable of evil: like Satan in Paradise Lost deciding to get back at God by attacking this new creature He has created, Man’.
Problems of the heart preoccupy a number of poets. In ‘A Seagull Murmur’ Robin Robertson brings to life the heart murmur he is describing as an actual ‘gull trapped in his chest’. Maura Dooley’s poignant, witty poem ‘STENT’ compares the processes of angioplasty and editing.
Gwyneth Lewis chose ophthalmology as her medical specialism because her mother is slowly losing her sight to glaucoma. ‘I was fascinated when Fred Fitzke, Professor of Visual Optics and Psychophysics at University College London, told me that, if you colour the cells in the eye, watching them light up as they commit suicide is exactly like watching stars. So, I imagined supernovae dimming in my mother’s eyes, as she struggles, these days, to knit with dark wool.’
‘Many of the poems in this anthology play with the boundaries between the self as subject and object,’ says Sian Ede, Arts Director at the Gulbenkian Foundation, ‘using language, as only poets can, to convey both the immediacy of pain and sensation, and a driven intellectual curiosity about cause and effect. It is an impressive, energetic, vigorous collection.’
Signs and Humours: The poetry of medicine, edited by Lavinia Greenlaw, is published by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation on 1 May 2007 (price, £8.50, ISBN: 978 1 903080 09 2).
Signs and Humours is available through booksellers in the UK or can be ordered from Central Books:
E-mail: orders@centralbooks.com
Website: www.centralbooks.co.uk
For further information and review copies contact: Felicity Luard or Louisa Hooper Tel: 020 7908 7604, e-mail: info@gulbenkian.org.uk website: www.gulbenkian.org.uk
Notes to Editors
Signs and Humours: The poetry of medicine, edited by Lavinia Greenlaw, is published by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation on 1 May 2007 as a paperback original, price: £8.50, 208pp, ISBN: 978 1 903080 09 2.
Signs and Humours includes new poems from Moniza Alvi, Maura Dooley, Ian Duhig, Grey Gowrie, David Harsent, W.N. Herbert, Kathleen Jamie, Jackie Kay, Stephen Knight, Michael Laskey, Gwyneth Lewis, Carola Luther, Jamie McKendrick, Daljit Nagra, Sean O’Brien, Ruth Padel, Richard Price, Denise Riley, Robin Robertson, Ann Sansom, Jo Shapcott and Greta Stoddart.
Lavinia Greenlaw is a poet and novelist who comes from a family of doctors and scientists. She has published three books of poems, most recently Minsk (Faber 2003), which was shortlisted for the Forward, T.S. Eliot and Whitbread Poetry Prizes, and two novels. Her memoir, The Importance of Music to Girls, will be published by Faber in August 2007.
Signs and Humours is a companion volume to Wild Reckoning: An anthology provoked by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, edited by John Burnside and Maurice Riordan and published by the Calouste Gulbenkian in 2004. When interviewed for the BBC Radio 4 programme Desert Island Discs the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser Professor Sir David King chose Wild Reckoning as the book he would take with him to his desert island.
The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation is well known for its pioneering work in the field of art and science and its seminal publications in this area. Strange and Charmed: Science and the contemporary visual arts (2000) has inspired numerous adventurous research collaborations and residencies in both science and arts organisations. Science, not Art: Ten scientists’ diaries (2003) was BBC Radio 4 ‘Book of the Week’ in February 2004. The Foundation funded Lavinia Greenlaw’s residency at the Royal Society of Medicine.
The Royal Society of Medicine, an independent, apolitical organisation founded 200 years ago, is one of the largest providers of continuing medical education in the UK. It also offers accredited courses for continuing professional development and aims to provide a broad range of educational activities and opportunities for doctors, dentists, and veterinary surgeons, including students of these disciplines, and allied health-care professionals. In addition it promotes an exchange of information and ideas on the science, practice and organisation of medicine, both within the health professions and with responsible and informed public opinion. www.rsm.ac.uk
Back
