Where I'd Watch Plastic Trees Not Grow

'I'm a widower grieving herself. / My stem still living / while all the petals have died; / my body has begun to droop.'

Hannah has taken her regular hospitalization due to serious illness and made it into astonishing poetry. Her world of the hospital is sometimes like a zoo, sometimes like a gallery and sometimes a crowded town square. The wards contain tigers and crows, butterflies - doctors become poets, the dead turn into an art installation, while outside, the trees are plastic - as unchanging as Hannah's shielding days that 'drag like a foot.' But between the pulled curtains of these words the details of real-life amongst the terminally ill are depicted in full colour. A daughter 'cries neatly in a corner' while her mourning father spins 'his wedding band around his finger.' Nurses fill 'carrier bags marked 'patient's property',' while 'the industrial plastic' crinkles as a body is lifted from bed to trolley in its bag. The poet's eye feels unblinking at times - unable but also unwilling to blink. How could it when it has so much to show? These poems are heavy with import, but they are light with the liveliness of art that is beautifully rendered.

'*These are extraordinary poems that contain both humour and grief towards a world that continually dehumanizes disabled people in multiple ways. With startling images, Hannah Hodgson balances anger and love, despair and hope - this is a pamphlet that will leave any reader irrevocably changed.'* - Kim Moore

Auteur

Hannah Hodgson is a poet living with life limiting illness. Her work has been published by the Poetry Society, Teen Vogue and Poetry Saltzburg, amongst others. She is the recipient of a 2020 Northern Writers Award for Poetry. Her first poetry pamphlet Dear Body was published by Wayleave Press in 2018.

Texte du rabat

'one day I wake up and it's November / bare branches are faulty umbilical cords / failing to implant the sky' In Tree, Natalie Whittaker is writing about her personal experience of stillbirth and the mental illness that can follow such a traumatic event. It is a subject that is still rarely addressed in poetry, writing or conversation. That she is able to do so here, in eighteen intricate, carefully crafted poems, in a way that is engaging, communicative, distressing and yet also beautiful, is a testament to her abilities as a poet, her strong grasp on the power of language and the power of her imagination. With these powers, she brings a harrowing subject close up and enables the reader to truly feel, to see, to understand, to share. It is a brave and necessary work, wonderfully and heart-breakingly realised. "next year I'll show you autumn and it will be so beautiful' - except autumn comes with an absence, the hardest of losses and so begins Tree, Natalie Whittaker's powerful and important collection on the experience of stillbirth. Her attention to detail is unflinching, and rightly so. We are taken from delivery room, to morgue, to the support group in a neon-lit church hall, to a landscape that is forever changed. These spare, exquisite poems explore the intricacies of sorrow, with a new and dazzling delicacy. As the blossom falls through Tree's pages, each poem quivers with not just grief, but a love that is celebrated, a love that is ongoing.' - Rebecca Goss