Tiffany Atkinson Readings
Tiffany Atkinson’s fourth collection Lumen looks at how might poetry help us articulate the body in illness, in work, and in love. It 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. Lumen is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Spring 2021.
Bookanista featured two of the poems from the opening sequence 'Dolorimeter', which won the 2014 Medicine Unboxed Prize. Read the poems here.
This sequence is reviewed on the BMJ's Medical Humanities blog here.
‘Like Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798), ‘Dolorimeter’s’ narrator is a voyager charting unexplored mythological seas; the nineteen poems, read together, form an epic, Odyssean whole… Atkinson’s magical realist descriptions, rich with gleeful, onomatopoeic imagery, swirl together and satisfyingly pop with anachronistic flashes. Patient, nurse, administrator, doctor, every one of them vibrant, enchanting, and persuasive. Full of life, even in the midst of death.’ - Laura Grace Simpkins, Medical Humanities
An excellent review features in the Summer 2021 issue of The High Window here.
‘Tiffany Atkinson’s fourth collection, Lumen, is delightfully innovative and thought-provoking in at times troubling, moving, intense and also exhilarating ways.... Lumen is one of those collections that is infinitely re-readable, sparking new connections and revealing new delights every time.’ - Sarah James, The High Window
PAST READINGS
Tuesday 23 February 2021, joint launch event with Fleur Adcock, Tiffany Atkinson, Aoife Lyall and Susan Wicks
Launch reading by Fleur Adcock, Tiffany Atkinson, Aoife Lyall and Susan Wicks. Hosted by editor Neil Astley from his home in Northumberland, this event was streamed live through the Bloodaxe Books YouTube channel on 23rd February 2021.
The poets all read from their newly published collections, and then answered questions from the online audience. Fleur Adcock read first in each set. Wonderful readings by poets from four different generations, followed by a very engaging discussion. Neil Astley introduces Tiffany Atkinson at 8:57.
[06 May 2021]
