Signs and Humours 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. Their preoccupations are brought right up to date in 22 specially commissioned poems, the result of discussions with leading doctors and scientists about contemporary biomedical practice, which include deliberations on the pathologies of our time, from autism and infertility to pancreatitis and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. 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, this anthology explores the questions that arise when we are forced to stop and consider our physical selves. How do we work, why do we go wrong, what do we mean when we say ‘How are you?’ or ‘It hurts’? Does a greater objective knowledge of medical cause and effect change our internalised view of ourselves? And how do poetic language and form reflect this change?

‘It hurts for a moment, but it really does make you feel better.’ Times Literary Supplement

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, Mary George of Allnorthover (Flamingo 2001), which won France’s Prix du Premier Roman, and An Irresponsible Age (Fourth Estate 2006). She has also collaborated with the photographic artist Garry Fabian Miller on Thoughts of a Night Sea (Merrell 2003) and written her first book of non-fiction, The Importance of Music to Girls (Faber 2007). Other awards include a Forward Prize, a Cholmondeley Award, an Arts Council England Writer’s Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA). Lavinia Greenlaw teaches at Goldsmiths College, University of London and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.