These Are the Hands: Poems from the Heart of the NHS

I don't really plan to write about the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and its worldwide consequences - or I won't be doing so until I have something I really want to say.

However, UK readers of my blog will agree that the NHS needs support, especially right now. And to offer your support in a poetry-relevant way, you could buy the new anthology These Are the Hands: Poems from the Heart of the NHS (Fair Acre Press).

This anthology was published just a few days ago and was planned for the 60th anniversary of the NHS. Rather sadly, right now, it is all too relevant and important - even more so than usual. It was edited by Deborah Alma (who you may also know as the Emergency Poet and proprietor of the Poetry Pharmacy) and Dr Katie Amiel, and the foreword is by Michael Rosen. The poems themselves are by NHS employees, along with contributions from well-known poets.

Profits from the anthology go to the NHS Charities Together COVID-19 Emergency Fund. I hear it's selling really well.

Again, you can buy it here: https://fairacrepress.co.uk/shop/these-are-the-hands-poems-from-the-heart-of-the-nhs/

The Emergency Poet To the Rescue: An Interview with Deborah Alma

Poetry Parnassus, which took place on London's Southbank at the end of June 2012, was a particularly rich poetic feast because it took care to communicate on a variety of levels. On one hand, there were readings from Nobel Prize winners and intense discussions on translation and the political power of poems; on the other hand, there was a Poems on the Underground workshop, activities for children, music, and a helicopter-led Rain of Poems. In other words, it was possible to find something for everyone.

Among the outdoor activities luring in unsuspecting passersby were a Poetry Takeaway, and also the 1950s ambulance belonging to the Emergency Poet. My curiosity led me over to this one day and I found myself reclining inside the ambulance, being prescribed poems which turned out to be just the thing (Wendell Berry's 'The Peace of Wild Things', and a passage from Eliot's Four Quartets - I tend to suffer from anxiety.) It was pretty obvious to me that Deborah Alma, the Emergency Poet herself, knew her stuff. Somehow, I felt that the Emergency Poet encapsulated the festival quite nicely. It was fun but also serious, entertaining but also well thought out. Deborah was obviously prepared to prescribe anything appropriate for poetry enthusiasts, for those who suffered from poetry-phobia, and all between.

Deborah and I subsequently stayed in touch and she has very kindly agreed to be interviewed for The Stone and the Star.


TSATS: Tell me about your background and where your interest in poetry came from.

DA: I grew up in a North London council estate where the only poetry around me was a scrawled rhyme on the side of a house, although we did write poetry at school. I'm the child of child parents, an Indian mother and a grammar school boy who dropped out of education when I came along! My beautiful grandmother read poetry, though, and we had a few books in the house.

TSATS: How did the Emergency Poet get started?

DA: It seemed to come in a burst of madness. But I suppose really it has emerged from my work with poetry and dementia, my working with literacy in primary schools for years as a teaching assistant, from being a poetry evangelist and from listening to friends and their problems over the kitchen table.

TSATS: What are your objectives as Emergency Poet? Tell me a bit about what you do.

DA: Its objectives are simple: that poetry has something to say, that it is for everyone, that it does not have to be difficult, that to stop and take time to value one's inner life is important. All lofty aims, but the reality is light and fun, although often with serious poetry at its core.

"Patients" are invited into the back of the ambulance and asked to lie down on the stretcher for a private consultation. Sounds from outside are hushed and the patient is given my complete attention. I might put a blanket over their knees if it's chilly. Then I ask questions such as "When was the last time you stood by the sea and is this important to you?", "Are you allergic to poetry or any types of poetry?" and "What are your desert island book choices?". These and other questions are designed to give me a sense of the person and their reading tastes, as well as their general well-being. Towards the end of the 10-minute consultation, I will ask if they would like a poem for anything specific and then make a suitable poetic prescription, which they can take away with them. I might read out the few lines from the poem that they should pay particular attention to and they are then advised to find some quiet space to take their "medicine". I might suggest they listen to birdsong, or to sit in silence for 5 minutes, or take it with a hot drink at bedtime.

TSATS: What are some of the most entertaining or inspiring things that have happened to you as Emergency Poet?

DA: I am always surprised at how open people are with their problems. I have been asked for a poem for a woman with breast cancer, a man who wanted a love poem for his wedding day, a woman whose best friend had died that morning... Being able to find them a poem has been such a joy. These poems have really mattered - this has been so inspiring for me.

I have prescribed poems with the words "bottom" and "willy" in them to children who have said they hate poetry and give them the instruction that they must take the poem with their favourite sweet. This prescription usually works!

TSATS: What are you particularly proud of accomplishing?

DA: I think the fact that I have got it up and running at all! I'm a single parent and when I started buying an old filthy ambulance and dressing up in a doctor's coat, my friends and family thought that I was more than a little crazy. It has been a work of real determination and has been financially scary, to say the least. At the end of last year I was delighted to have been successful with an Arts Council grant which has helped the project enormously and meant that I can take it more seriously.

TSATS: I know that you're also a poet in your own right. Can you tell me a bit about your poetry and its sources of inspiration?

DA: I have just completed my MA and for my dissertation I submitted a portfolio of poems. I write, I suppose, about relationships, about disappointment and loss and sex. I love to read widely and am often inspired by the writings of others. This is sometimes not good for my self-confidence, though!

(You can read one of Deborah's poems, 'On Sleeping Alone', in the Ink Sweat & Tears e-zine: http://www.inksweatandtears.co.uk/pages/?p=3529)

TSATS: Where are you planning to take the Emergency Poet next?

DA: I have a busy Emergency Poet tour for this year. It includes Wenlock Poetry Festival, Ledbury Poetry Festival, Stratford Literary Festival, Sparks' Children's Arts Festival, Ludlow Fringe, Lichfield, Nottingham Library, Walsall Library, Just So Festival, a new spoken-word festival in Knaresborough called Release the Hounds, and Poetry Can in Bristol.

TSATS: Do you have other poetry and/or literature-related endeavours underway at the moment, or in the works?

DA: I have several! As well as the poetry and dementia project, I teach Creative Writing for Writing West Midlands' Writing Squad, I occasionally work for Arvon, I will be teaching Writing Poetry for Worcester University from this autumn, and I am organising a Poetry Party as part of Ludlow Arts Festival this summer with the poet Jean Atkin.


You can find the Emergency Poet website here: http://emergencypoet.com/

Wendell Berry's 'The Peace of Wild Things': Leave Your Anxieties and Have a Cup of Tea With the Wolf in the Field of Flowers

Wolf photo by Fremlin. Used under Creative Commons license


Everyone seems to be very stressed out for one reason or another, which I in turn find stressful. Hermitry beckons, or else 'The Peace of Wild Things'. Wolves are one of my favourite wild creatures, if not my favourite, and this fellow looks rather peaceful in a field of flowers.


THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS (Wendell Berry)


The Emergency Poet prescribed this poem to me at Poetry Parnassus, and I was already familiar with it, but I loved it as a choice. I think I had talked about anxiety a fair bit in those few minutes. (I also started thinking about tea therapy tonight; I think we need to get some kind of poetry/tea therapy going.) The wild animals in this poem have the advantage that they "do not tax their lives with forethought/of grief"; a pretty good description of anxiety, I'd say.

The Sermon on the Mount has some of the most practical and comforting words about anxiety ever spoken or written. It comes in different guises, of course, but the illustration of "the lilies of the field" (Matthew 6:25-32) who remain loved and cared for although "they do not toil, nor do they spin" is worth calling to mind in so many situations (particularly as it's possible to feel anxiety and a lack of security both practically and emotionally.) Finally, Jesus said: “Keep on, then, seeking first the kingdom and his [God's] righteousness, and all these other things will be added to you. So, never be anxious about the next day, for the next day will have its own anxieties. Sufficient for each day is its own badness." (Matthew 6:33, 34, New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures).

Poetry Parnassus on Friday and Saturday: Lost Geographers, Shifting Continents, Poetic Emergencies and Revolution

Poetry Parnassus, this past week at London's Southbank Centre, was a really extraordinary experience and one which I wish hadn't come to an end quite so soon. I took in a good many events, but I wish that I could have somehow gone to even more, or all of them...

On Friday, I spent about half the day at the festival. My first event was the Geography For The Lost workshop with Bulgaria's Kapka Kassabova. I'd chosen this because poetry of travel and place is one of my chief enthusiasms and the prime inspiration for a lot of my own writing. I wanted to find different ways to approach this kind of writing, and the workshop was really stimulating. We read a variety of poems and approached travel poetry as descriptions of place, as reflections of relationships, and so on. It was encouraging to see what a variety of people had joined this small workshop, too - maybe unsurprisingly given its nature, between us we'd been born on or lived on virtually every continent.

The star event of Poetry Parnassus was in the evening - Continental Shift, featuring the following poets:

Wole Soyinka (Nigeria)
Seamus Heaney (Ireland)
Bill Manhire (New Zealand)
Kay Ryan (USA)
Jo Shapcott (UK)
Kim Hyesoon (South Korea)
Togara Muzanenhamo (Zimbabwe)

This was an incredible lineup. I had seen Seamus Heaney a couple of times before, but he is a delightful reader and he always seems to choose different poems. I found his reading of the Song of Amergin, and 'I Am Raftery' in Irish, really moving, as were his own 'Two Lorries' and 'A Peacock's Feather'. Wole Soyinka had an incredible presence and body of work, only disturbed by the fact that his own mobile phone went off during one of his poems; a pretty hilarious moment. (He muttered something like "Oh my God, if this is who I think it is...") Seeing two such elder statesmen of poetry (sorry for the cliche, but what else can you call these two Nobel Prize winners?) at the same event was very exciting. As well, I was totally disturbed and fascinated by Kim Hyesoon, especially 'The Sublime Kitchen'. Bill Manhire's 'Erebus Voices', about the Air New Zealand/Mt Erebus disaster, made me cry. Togara Muzanenhamo was, I think, a late addition, but superb. He had undergone an odyssey, as two years previously he'd not been able to get a visa for the UK, and for this event his visa had only come through at the last minute. Such experiences weren't uncommon for a good few of the poets at Poetry Parnassus, I think, and apparently some failed to get a visa, again.

Seamus Heaney at Continental Shift:

On Saturday morning I went to Bill Manhire's workshop about memory exercises, which was fruitful. A few meaningful coincidences, too; he made reference to Wallace Stevens's 'Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," which I hadn't been very familiar with previously but had read just a couple of days before the festival. I then caught some of the free readings in the Clore Ballroom, sponsored by various publishers and journals. I loved the poem by Zambia's Kayo Chingonyi about cassette tapes - great for those of us over a certain age - and it was lovely to hear George Szirtes read 'Mapping the Delta', and to meet him briefly. (Another coincidence: on Sunday, at Poetry Review's stand where they had a free Lucky Dip, I picked up a copy of 'Mapping the Delta', to my delight.)

I also paid a visit to the Emergency Poet, which was so nice. Deborah Alma invites patients into her old ambulance, asks questions such as "Do you enjoy walking by the sea and how often do you get to do it?", "Are there any types of poetry you are allergic to?" and "What books would be on your desert island list?", and then makes suitable poetic prescriptions. I got an excerpt from T S Eliot's 'East Coker', and Wendell Berry's 'The Peace of Wild Things', both of which were quite spot-on to ease my nervous disposition. Deborah Alma also works with dementia patients using poetry, so I felt that there was a serious intent behind the fun.

The Emergency Poet's ambulance:

A little later, there was another amazing event, 'They Won't Take Me Alive: Women and Revolution'. This was a panel and reading, featuring Gioconda Belli (Nicaragua), Chiranan Pitpreecha (Thailand), and Farah Didi (Maldives). All have in one way or another been politically involved and used poetry to bring attention to the issues of their countries and the personal impact of oppression, war and loss. Again, I was really struck by how powerfully meaningful poetry is in such countries, and how even writing poetry can be a brave, dangerous act. Amanda Hopkinson read poetry by Alaide Foppa, who was "disappeared" in Guatemala in the 1980s. When 'Exile' was read, many people in the room were in tears, including myself.

I then had a quick drink with a friend, and we discussed Eliot and Pound while overlooking the Thames, and then I called it a day for poetry. I'll write about Sunday at Poetry Parnassus shortly, but must call it a night, now!