Winner of the 2014 Medicine Unboxed Prize
Poetry Book Society Recommendation
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.
Lumen's opening sequence 'Dolorimeter' won Medicine Unboxed's Creative Prize in 2014.
'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 2021)
‘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.’ – Medical Humanities
'Atkinson’s Lumen is a delight. The poetry is exuberant, smart and utterly original' – Katrina Naomi, New Welsh Review
‘...a good poet makes you laugh, wonder, and even cringe at times; they unsettle you. It’s not always easy reading...Atkinson’s Lumen gives us a glimpse into language’s dizzying heights...’ – Nathan Munday, Wales Arts Review
'Atkinson's poems are intent on tackling 'the quandary of what's inside', and doing so with a cool, intelligent beauty, offset by wit and serious personal reflection. The cover of this book is a thing of beauty in itself.' – Diana Cant, The Alchemy Spoon [on Lumen]
‘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
Tiffany Atkinson was born in Berlin in 1972 to an army family, and lived in Wales after moving to Cardiff to take a PhD in Critical Theory. After teaching at Aberystwyth University for some years, she is now Professor in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.
She won the Cardiff Academi International Poetry Competition in 2001. Her first collection, Kink and Particle (Seren, 2006), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, won the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was shortlisted for the Glen Dimplex New Writers Award. Catulla et al (Bloodaxe Books, 2011), her second collection, was shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year) in 2012 and was a TLS Book of the Year. Her third collection, So Many Moving Parts (Bloodaxe Books, 2014), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and won the Roland Mathias Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year) in 2015. She won a Cholmondeley Award in 2022, a prize which recognises a poet's body of work.
She is the editor of a theoretical textbook, The Body: A Reader (2003), and has strong research interests in the medical humanities, especially the history of anatomy and representations of the body. Her fourth collection, Lumen (Bloodaxe Books, 2021), also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, includes a sequence exploring representations of pain, illness and recovery – work that won the 2014 Medicine Unboxed Prize. She is currently working on a series of critical essays about ‘the poetics of embarrassment’.
