Review by Kate Durban of "The Day My Head Exploded: Poems About Healthcare" by Rob Gee

If you haven’t discovered Rob Gee and his wonderful poems you are in for a treat. Rob is a nurse and a poet. Until recently he was retired from the nursing profession but returned to help out during the Coronavirus pandemic, an action that seems typical of the generous and committed nature that shines through in his poems.  As a fellow nurse I jumped at the chance of reading and reviewing this collection. What a voyage of discovery it has been.

Rob’s approach to nursing and life are irreverent, comic (sometimes deliciously and darkly so), compassionate, inclusive, poignant and political. All at once!  How does he do that? One of the keys to Rob’s success is the desire to share not only his own voice and perspective as a nurse, but also those of his clients, their families and his colleagues. Hence many of the poems are group poems.

Rob’s work is seriously insightful and seriously funny. Who couldn’t laugh out loud in delighted recognition to read: 'the receptionist had all the social skills of a neglected commode' (from the title poem). Rob uses wonderful imagery, which conveys observations about the world of mental illness and its related care environments with great clarity. For instance: 'Ben’s psyche is unraveling / like the thread on a crap cardie.' And: 'Herman prattles on forever / Each word knitting his brain back together.' These images say so much in so few words. They linger in the mind.

Rob’s poems don’t shy away from the huge costs paid by the people suffering with mental (and physical) illness and those caring for them. In 'Elsie’s letter,' a woman with dementia pleads with those who look after her that: 'When I finally lose it all / please give me somewhere soft to fall.' And in the poem 'Our loss,' Rob describes the response of staff and patients on a ward after a suicide as: 'The grief went through the ward like a horrific ripple.' We all grieve.

It is this sense of community on the wards which is as authentic as it is heart-warming, and as I read the poems I felt deep vibrations of recognition and resonance, both as a nurse and as a human being. The poems are full of stories all the more beautiful because they are true. In the poem 'Psychiatric Crash Team,' Rob is called in when a patient becomes aggressive because he wants to go out and buy cigarettes. When Rob bumps his head on the doorframe this patient stops what he is doing, leans down and holds out his hand to help him up. Then, the whole ward have a whip round, not for money, but for tobacco to give their fellow patient. As Rob says, we are all 'part of each other’s journey.' The lines between patient, nurse and carer are blurred but in a good way. Except, that is, for the awful 'Dr. Brice.'

Whether you are a nurse, or  someone affected by mental illness as a sufferer or carer, or you just like good poems, don’t miss Rob Gee’s wonderful new collection. It will make you laugh and teach you a lot about how to live life with compassionate generosity, integrity, and a large dose of irreverent humour.

About the reviewer

Kate Durban is a Cancer Wellbeing Specialist Nurse who lives in Northamptonshire with her husband and two dogs. She is currently an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester.

You can read more about Rob Gee's The Day My Head Exploded, as well as a sample from it, on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Jonathan Taylor of "The English Disease" by Lydia Towsey

As with her previous poetry collection, Lydia Towsey’s second book, The English Disease, is full of poems which are musical, lyrical, performative, but which also jump off the page into the ears and mouth of the reader: poems, that is, which work equally out loud or ‘in-loud’ – heard via silently-moving lips in the mind’s-ear of the reader. 

In these poems, the reader hears of modern England’s diseases and their symptoms – as well as possible cures, some which help, some of which make them worse: ‘There must be a shot. / There must be a cure // for the English disease, the English disease.’ Towsey asks diseased England to ‘write back’ to her, so she, like a poet-doctor, can diagnose what is wrong – and what might be right, too. Among the militant nationalists, the ‘men in monocles abusing privilege,’ the ‘treatments / elections and referendums,’ the war-mongering, the failed primeministers, the arms sales, the xenophobia, she traces a counter-narrative, a counter-culture, a half-obscured English tradition of resistance, hospitality, rebellion, subversive humour, courtesy, a ‘decency of queues.’ This is a crypto-Socialist England, not unlike that imagined by George Orwell in his great essay The Lion and the Unicorn, which needs to ‘remember the speeches’:

          We shall welcome them on the beaches. 
          We shall welcome them on landing grounds. 
          We shall welcome them in the felds and in the streets. 
          We shall welcome in the hills. 

          I remember Monty Python, 
          I remember Bowie, 
          I remember Boudicca, 
          I remember Bevan.

Politics, though, is not all speeches and heroes, not all Boudiccas and Bevans and Guy Fawkeses. It does not only happen on a national scale. It is also a uniquely personal force, as universal as gravity, which operates between people in queues, friends sharing cups of tea. And Towsey’s poetry beautifully captures moments of connection between the political and the personal, the macrocosmic and microcosmic. It stands with Jung, when he declares that ‘the psychology of the individual is reflected in the psychology of the nation.’ In Towsey’s poetry, family history, parenthood, eating disorders, tea drinking, queuing, politeness and its opposite all reflect the psychology of contemporary England – a psychology which intermingles all these things with a traumatic history ‘built on broken bones / returning boats to burning homes.’ 

Still, if this national history is reflected in individual actions and, indeed, individual poems, it can also be distorted, refracted, resisted – through utopian moments of friendship, through twisted nursery rhymes, reconceived myths, and a new language that Towsey calls ‘Zomblish.’ Towsey’s are visionary poems which reflect national psychological states, and then go on to shatter them, in order to piece together new, better ones – of ‘Donald Trump saying sorry. / Fiscal reform to favour the many. / My daughter sleeping through the night.’ A better England – a better world – is possible, and Towsey’s poems hold out that hope: 

          Build me a picket fence, 
          form me a queue. 

          Shall we sit for days on end 
          and talk as weather beats on tents?

          The light that sets on the British Empire 
          points from yesterday to a new tomorrow. 
          This land might grow a new beginning. 

          This generation must find a way. 
          There must be a salve.

About the reviewer

Jonathan Taylor is an author, editor, critic and lecturer. His books include the novel Melissa (Salt, 2015), the poetry collection Cassandra Complex (Shoestring, 2018), and the memoir Take Me Home (Granta, 2007). He directs the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. His website is www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk. 

Review by Jonathan Taylor of "The Venus Papers" by Lydia Towsey

I had the honour of introducing Lydia Towsey's first full-length poetry collection, The Venus Papers (Burning Eye Books, 2015), at the launch event as part of Everybody's Reading Festival. The following review is the text of my introduction.

Lydia Towsey's new book, The Venus Papers, exemplifies one of my favourite forms of contemporary poetry: that is, the poetry which manages simultaneously to be both performative and musical, on the one hand, and beautiful, intellectually stimulating and poignant page poetry, on the other. Not many poets manage to sustain this balancing act - but who do succeed in fusing performativity with written lyricism in their work.

Lydia's collection is at once diverse and coherent in its fusing of such musical, performative and lyrical elements. There are various narrative strands which run throughout the book (which makes me glad I read it, for once, cover to cover, not as I'd usually read a poetry book, by dipping into separate poems). These themes include mother-daughter relationships and matrilinearity in general; Hungarian and Welsh heritages; the politics of immigration, filtered through the powerful allegory of Venus turning up in modern-day Britain; travel poems, vivid recreations of South Africa, America, Europe and so on; and, of course, the overwhelming significance of a good cup of tea.

I particularly enjoyed the ways in which Lydia's poems deal with politics: the politics of immigration, of dictatorship, of gender. In poems like "Incanto," "Venus Votes," "Things People Say About Venus in the Tabloids," and "Hungary," to name just a few, Lydia tackles deeply important political subjects, but in ways which are original, poetic, fascinating - defamiliarising what the media inures us to, what TV and newspapers ideologically obscure, often by rendering all too familiar, everyday, banal. Lydia's poetry does the opposite: making the horrific, the tragic, the unjustifiable seem themselves again.

About the reviewer
Jonathan Taylor's books include the novels Melissa (Salt, 2015), and Entertaining Strangers (Salt, 2012). His poetry collection is Musicolepsy (Shoestring, 2013). He is Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. See www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk.