Lumen
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Published:25th Feb '21
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
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. Winner of the 2014 Medicine Unboxed Prize.
Atkinson’s Lumen is a delight. The poetry is exuberant, smart and utterly original.
-- Katrina Naomi * New Welsh Review *In Tiffany Atkinson’s Lumen, the poem ‘Accident and Emergency’ from the opening sequence ‘Dolorimeter’ begins: “Anyone claiming that time / is objective deserves a night / in A&E”. The heart-breaking and vividly tangible similes and metaphors in ‘Heroin works’ load up to overwhelm us, as the chronic pain does, here under the spotlight, for a young woman and her family. The book moves from its intense sequence on pain into joyful, sharp, smart poems that wryly monitor and transform the private business of friendship, dogs, food, firewood, work, neighbours and crying into a metaphysical of the quotidian. I love the book’s lustrous vocabulary – think sempiternal, mommet, thurifer – and the particularity of its point of view, which is inquiring, with a ‘what am I really?’ mode of address and a quiet persistence. A friend of a book.
-- Jane Wilkinson * Poetry News (Best poetry books of the year 202ISBN: 9781780375304
Dimensions: 234mm x 156mm x 7mm
Weight: unknown
80 pages