Hannah Hodgson is a seriously ill poet, deploying the surreal and the medical to chart institutional truths vs the individual. 163 days is the length of her longest hospitalisation. Here we join her. At turns funny and hopeful, frightening and moving, this collection is an unusual look at impending mortality and the body/mind as separate selves.
Hannah has taken her regular hospitalization due to serious illness and made it into astonishing poetry. Her world of the hospital is sometimes like a zoo, sometimes like a gallery and sometimes a crowded town square. The wards contain tigers and crows, butterflies – doctors become poets, the dead turn into an art installation, while outside, the trees are plastic – as unchanging as Hannah’s shielding days that ‘drag like a foot.’But between the pulled curtains of these words the details of real-life amongst the terminally ill are depicted in full colour. A daughter ‘cries neatly in a corner’ while her mourning father spins ‘his wedding band around his finger.’ Nurses fill ‘carrier bags marked ‘patient’s property’,’ while ‘the industrial plastic’ crinkles as a body is lifted from bed to trolley in its bag.The poet’s eye feels unblinking at times – unable but also unwilling to blink. How could it when it has so much to show? These poems are heavy with import, but they are light with the liveliness of art that is beautifully rendered.
In this powerful collection Hannah Hodgson gives us the complexity of the disabled body; these poems address both its beauty alongside the rage that results from being continually overlooked and marginalised. Formally varied, inventive and brightly observed, these poems take on love, sex, family and the Covid pandemic, often with warm humour and a surrealist wit.