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14/08/09
Michael Rosen, ex-Children's Poet Laureate in the UK, has agreed that his commissioned poem about the NHS "These are the Hands" can join the "Poems for..." collection and be translated into different languages.
25/02/09
Hyphen-21 backs proposal for a code of professional practice for service user consultation.
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| Poem - A Light Summer Dying |
The long poem “A Light Summer Dying” has previously been published in a digital magazine based in Glasgow called “Echoes of Gilgamesh.”
It tells the true story of how a young woman I knew died of cancer, leaving behind her husband and two small sons. A good half of it was written as a kind of diary at the time of the woman’s illness and she knew I was writing it. I actually read her the first excerpt in her hospital room. She took comfort from the thought that her sons would be able to read about her death later in their lives.
So the poem’s writing is, I think, less an act of healing for me, following a bereavement, than a parting gift to someone I was fond of and admired. Further, it is not so much a “work of art” as a piece of neighbourly journalism, written originally for a youthful readership of two. Or, put another way, I am not the poem’s maker as such ; events as they unfolded made the poem and I was just the recording witness. Or, yet again, it’s the people living this story who were the poem’s makers ; my role was simply to record what they made.
Maybe I’m over-egging this point. But for me one of the strengths of the poem, and the reason I can trust it, is that it is based in these ordinary facts, rooted in affection and community. I need to be sure on this point, because offering to read the poem publically now (as I do) is in effect to invite people to a stranger’s funeral ; further, I am asking them to join me in what is certainly a painful place. So I need to be as sure as possible that there is nothing gratuitous going on here, and I am not inviting people to join me merely to shock them or take part with me in some sorry act of voyeurism.
When I finally completed the poem quite a long time after the woman was dead, it received praise from various judges I could trust (see across). Suggestions were made for publication and for readings. But again, at no stage in its cautious advance has the poem left its roots. This is a living testimony and it involves living people. Every time I take it somewhere new, I confer with the dead woman’s widower. We check with each other (and in a sense with her, as best we can) whether this latest step is in the spirit of the poem’s original conception and continues in true respect of her and her family. Again, this check re-assures me and feels crucial to the poem’s integrity.
On its composition, I have two final things to say : one is that, despite the above, true and important though it is, I could not have written the poem purely out of benevolent friendship. I had not been close to a dying before and this was someone I was deeply fond of – and I was awed and appalled. Perhaps for this reason I could not write such a thing again. The second point is : as the woman’s illness developed headlong, so my admiration for her conduct led to a new kind of awe. For she died a classic “Good Death” leaving me slightly worried in case this poem contributes to a kind of template of how one is supposed to die. Personally I do not expect to die as well as she, and I shall not be grateful to this poem if it adds to my own discomforts of that time by making me feel inadequate as well !
I have read the poem to the following groups : social work staff and students (twice), student nurses on a Bereavement option (once), teachers involved in nurse training (once), a group of poets and others interested in things literary, including the local vicar (once), a similar group but this time including practicing hospice nurses and their chaplain (once).
From my own point of view each of the readings has been an experience of high intensity. Afterwards I have always felt, “this is what the poem is for, doing this ; this is what poetry is for, doing this ; this is what I am for, doing this”.
That intensity lay partly of course in the words and the story they tell ; but partly too in the electric charge they seem to create in the room. On each occasion, reader and listeners have gone through something quite cathartic together and in doing so have formed a circle of shared experience that needs careful and sensitive handling. I the reader have no right to walk out quickly at the end of my reading. We need to find ways of easing down together, before separating.
One has to ask, why a poem that simply tells the story of just another death has proved so powerful ? The inescapable answer is that, even among professionals who work with the dying, Society’s taboo and our natural escape mechanisms remain at work, encouraging detachment and abstraction. The poem challenges that detachment, and succeeds in its purpose insofar as it makes the experience of the dying woman, her family and her community, real, present and poignant.
My knowledge that reading the poem puts people through something (it puts me through something, too) means that I shall always be slightly cautious of it, always wary of just shoving it under people’s noses - “Hey, take a look at what I’ve done !” People keep telling me that in the final analysis it is an uplifting poem, because (I think) it is tender and records humans acting under pressure in a way both recognisable and admirable. I need to hear that. Certainly I know for certain that it was written lovingly.
Teachers have different reasons for inviting me to read the poem, of course, and I can’t speak for them ; but I suspect in most cases it has something to do with the fact that the poem makes the experience of dying an emotional reality, addresses some common professional issues and conundrums and explores and emphasises the effect of a death on a whole family and local community.
Perhaps my biggest test so far has been reading it to some hospice nurses and the hospice chaplain. If I had been moved to write it at least partly because this was my first close encounter with death, how would experienced staff react to it, who work carefully and sensitively with dying people every day ? Would they find it merely presumptuous, self-indulgent ? On the contrary, their feed-back was perhaps the strongest and most positive of all. They said it made real, vivid and human an experience that their daily exposure to death too easily objectified ; it somehow released and sensitised them to the value, meaning and largeness of what they do and the life-defining significance of what their patients’ are living through.
Rogan Wolf November 2006
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A Light Summer Dying
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See the poem in full by clicking the link.
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Some Comments on the Poem
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“It’s extremely moving – all the more so for being completely unsentimental and continually sharp-eyed. It doesn’t flinch and it manages to combine the anger of grief with a sense of something more stoical – accepting the inevitable I suppose…..I think it would work very powerfully in performance.."
Andrew Motion, Poet Laureate
“ ‘A Light Summer Dying’ is a masterpiece of empathy, delicate imagination, love and insight. The title is wonderful…. Such a heartbreaking, yet also uplifting poem…..it would be wonderful if this were printed in a pamphlet. I think it would give a sad joy and courage to many people. It was an honour to be sent this poem.”
Moniza Alvi, poet
"Reading this poem, I became an invisible watcher at the bedside of a woman I did not know, and yet in the space of a few words I knew her and her suffering and her strength better than I knew myself.”
Caroline Carver, poet
“Light Summer Dying” by Rogan Wolf packs an emotional punch unequalled by either the conventional short poem or indeed the long poems published in this magazine. Its subject matter is a young women dying of cancer. Not only is it very moving but it is well crafted and manages to maintain its emotional intensity throughout. We highly recommend this poem to our readers.”
Paul McDonagh, editor “Echoes of Gilgamesh” July edition 2003
'Light Summer Dying' is beautiful and exquisitely moving…Everyone who reads it will get to know the young mother whose life and death it celebrates, and most will also relive - as I did - our own griefs for loved ones lost…I wept each time I read it. It's a lovely poem……..”
Debjani Chatterjee, poet
“…I found it incredibly moving. I also found I couldn't stop reading it - it was compulsive. …It is a lovely, cruel, ecstatic poem which deserves to be heard.”
Miriam Obrey, poet
“I think this is good, strong and unflinching, like the woman it celebrates, and should be published.”
Roger Garfitt, poet
“Deeply moving…..The idea of birth as an image of this death is remarkable and very striking.”
Rashida Islam, poet
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