A Hospital Odyssey: 9781852248772 - Softcover

Gwyneth Lewis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1852248777 ISBN 13: 9781852248772

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 2010

Synopsis

A Hospital Odyssey is an outrageously imaginative voyage through illness and healing. Drawing on the most recent biomedical research into stem cells and cancer, the poem is a journey through the body's inner space and the strange habitats created by disease, including the chimeras people see when they're unwell. Maris, whose husband, Hardy, has been diagnosed with cancer, is separated from him. Her mythical journey leads though a surreal landscape, peopled by true and false physicians, god-celebrities, rabid statues, diseases hunting healthy bodies and a microbes holding their annual ball. The Otherworld is located in the hospital's basement. In her desperate search Maris meets and converses with Aneurin Bevan, founder of the NHS. Immensely readable, "A Hospital Odyssey" is a modern epic: "Dr Who" meets "Paradise Lost". The poem asks: what is health? And what does it mean to care for someone who's ill?

About this title

Review

Gwyneth Lewis's remarkable long poem, an epic for our time, tracks...a pilgrim's progress, as Maris, her heroine and surrogate, takes on both disease and the National Health Service in her fight to save her cancer-stricken husband, Hardy. The result is a kind of surreal modern morality tale...overall, this is a performance that more than confirms Gwyneth Lewis's reputation as one of the most exhilaratingly gifted poets of her generation. --M. Wynn Thomas, Guardian

Gwyneth Lewis's astonishing book-length poem...transforms weighty subject matter into a heady mix of dream vision, ripping yarn and love story. The hospital becomes a version of Dante's Inferno, where Maris witnesses the Microbes' Ball ("Imagine a disco painted by Bosch") and meets, among others, Helen of Troy and Aneurin Bevan, the founder of the NHS. Along the way there are also hard-won insights: "When love's so weary it hopes for nothing/ it's at its strongest, though it feels no power." --Paul Batchelor, The Times, Best Poetry Books of the Year

What is most remarkable in a book of such exuberant invention is that the reader continues to believe in Maris's intense longing for her sick husband. But Maris is not only seeking her husband, she is doing battle for him against his illness...The range of reference is so wide, we are intoxicated by it, from the possibilities of stem cell research to the myths of Eliade and the smear of her husband's bone marrow, "like a coastline on its glass slide". --Elaine Feinstein, Independent

About the Author

Gwyneth Lewis was Wales s National Poet from 2005 to 2006, the first writer to be given the Welsh laureateship. Her first six books of poetry in Welsh and English were followed by Chaotic Angels (2005) from Bloodaxe, which brings together the poems from her English collections, Parables & Faxes, Zero Gravity and Keeping Mum, and by A Hospital Odyssey(2010), and Sparrow Tree (2011), winner of the Roland Mathias Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year) in 2012. Her other books include Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book about Depression (Flamingo, 2002) and Two in a Boat: A Marital Voyage (Fourth Estate, 2005) and The Meat Tree: new stories from the Mabinogion (Seren, 2010). Her Welsh collection, Y Llofrudd Iaith (Barddas, 2000), won the Welsh Arts Council Book of the Year Prize, and her English collection Keeping Mum was shortlisted for the same prize. Both Zero Gravity and Keeping Mum were Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Gwyneth Lewis composed the words on the front of the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff, opened in 2004. Her dramatisation of her book-length poem A Hospital Odyssey was broadcast as BBC Radio 4's Afternoon Drama on 26 June 2014. She lives in Cardiff.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1852248777
• ISBN 13: 9781852248772
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176