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    Lumen
    Lumen
    Lumen
    Ebook90 pages1 hour

    Lumen

    By Tiffany Atkinson

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    About this ebook

    How might poetry help us articulate the body in illness, in work, and in love? Tiffany Atkinson’s fourth collection includes the prize-winning sequence ‘Dolorimeter’, which takes fragments of speech and found text from a hospital residency to pay homage to the inventiveness and humour of patients and staff in a series of meditations on the notion that pain resists language. Away from the wards, other poems consider the strangeness of the workplace and the embarrassing incursions of desire into everyday life, celebrating the ability of poetic language to lay awkwardness and uncertainty alongside unexpected openings and glimpses of revelation. A lumen is a unit of light, but also a channel or an opening inside the body; perhaps, in this collection, it may also serve as a metaphor for the work of the poem itself. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloodaxe Books
    Release dateDec 22, 2020
    ISBN9781780375311
    Lumen
    Author

    Tiffany Atkinson

    Tiffany Atkinson was born in Berlin in 1972 to an army family, and lived in Wales after moving to Cardiff to take a PhD in Critical Theory. After teaching at Aberystwyth University for some years, she is now Professor in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. She won the Cardiff Academi International Poetry Competition in 2001. Her first collection, Kink and Particle (Seren, 2006), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, won the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was shortlisted for the Glen Dimplex New Writers Award. Catulla et al (Bloodaxe Books, 2011), her second collection, was shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year) in 2012 and was a TLS Book of the Year. Her third collection, So Many Moving Parts (Bloodaxe Books, 2014), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and won the Roland Mathias Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year) in 2015. She is the editor of a theoretical textbook, The Body: A Reader (2003), and has strong research interests in the medical humanities, especially the history of anatomy and representations of the body. Her fourth collection, Lumen (Bloodaxe Books, 2021), also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, includes a sequence exploring representations of pain, illness and recovery – work that won the 2014 Medicine Unboxed Prize. She is currently working on a series of critical essays about ‘the poetics of embarrassment’.

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      Book preview

      Lumen - Tiffany Atkinson

      I

      Dolorimeter

      19 readings

      With warmest thanks to the staff and patients of Bronglais Hospital, Aberystwyth

      /ˌdɒləˈrɪmɪtə/

      A dolorimeter

      is an instrument

      used to measure pain

      threshold and tolerance.

      Dolorimetry has been defined

      as ‘the measurement of pain sensitivity

      or pain intensity’. See inter alia: reliability.

      We might also call it language.

      Table 8.1 What makes patients anxious about gastroscopy

      58% vomiting

      ENDOGEAR CONTENTS

      Tubing for EGP 100

      Endo – within Skopeo – to view

      Milk-free tea then Mari    for an endoscopy

      50% cancer

      Some patients like to look at the screen

      Hippocrates is recorded as having inspected the rectum

      with a candle    Some don’t

      36% uncertainty

      Mr Edwards a pair of dignity shorts

      Let’s start at the top end    a quickie    For

      a couple starting out this is a great home to get stuck into

      32% breathlessness

      Waiting for hospital transport and may have to go at a

      moment’s notice    looked out of the window

      saw the rugby saw the green green grass

      26% pain

      Embarrassing Bodies

      is a way of reaching that demographic

      A problem of language (1985)

      Everyone is used to it but me

      16% the injection

      gastro    she said it’s gastro    gastro

      A laryngectomy cough is the sound of a vixen

      far off in the dark    My god

      I wanted sedatives I was terrified

      15% losing self-control

      Clean area:    male/female changing

      rooms    staff/rest rooms with adjoining

      kitchen    I refused radiotherapy

      14% duration of endoscopy

      Dirty areas:    automated

      endoscope disinfector double sink/

      drainer    work surface with cupboards under

      Don’t Die of Embarrassment

      9% at mercy of others

      bad with pro    nounce    ee    ation    especially

      Arabic names    One of the problems

      Andy had to deal with was a party wall

      I had a bad time but was well-looked-

      after    24 hour use    discard daily

      Oh my husband was an angel

      4%

      death

      Heroin works

      The consultant’s tales fly out around

      corners and just before doors swing shut

      Like one about a chronic painer    one of his first

      and abdominal pain being one of the worst things

      she was desperate and all of her family    desperate.

      In the house the pain hung like laundry from each edge.

      You could walk in and feel it flap against your face.

      It was thick in some corners like meat

      and there was nowhere else to put it.

      The mother was smoking Silk Cut back-to-back.

      The pain was like television left on loud in a room

      that you couldn’t get into. The father was busy

      and the pain was a baby that no one could find.

      The brothers were upstairs    all three    loudly

      and the patient herself was glassy and still

      just out of her teens with a face of clenched fingers.

      It was all like the mouth of a tunnel    where no one

      could turn round and no one could carry on

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