Poet in Residence

Fiona Sampson

Since October 2004, Fiona Sampson has been poet in residence at Addenbrooke’s, working in the hospital one day every other week.

She has had significant experience of working in health-care settings and has written publications about writing in healthcare.

The Aims of the Residence are to:

- excite interest in poetry and literature for patients, visitors and staff

- create work to be displayed in the hospital

- offer a distraction to patients from the stresses of being in hospital

- to make Addenbrooke’s a cultural venue

- to enhance the recovery process through the use of art.

- These will be achieved by:

- organising creative writing workshops for patients, visitors and staff. These will give hospital users the opportunity to respond to the live literature performances given by the poet on wards and clinics. They will also assist in profiling the poet further within the hospital community

- giving live literature performances

- talking and listening to patients, visitors and staff

- creating new work

- displaying the resulting poetry in unusual places and in areas where patients, visitors wait. This could be in outpatients’ clinics, lifts, toilets, ceilings, the Internet, and on PatientLine, the patient communication device

- increasing access to poetry through the hospital website and PatientLine

- increasing access to poetry through the provision of a poetry trolley, which will be wheeled around to patients' beds

- establishing a programme of poetry readings by local poets on wards and day rooms.

Fiona has organised a number of creative writing workshops for patients. These easy-going workshops offer patients the opportunity to listen to, read and write poetry.

Fiona's poems are now displayed on three wards to give patients, visitors and staff a chance to read poetry.

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Poems

In the early evening, as now

In the early evening, as now, a man is bending
over his writing table. Louise Glück, Poem

The lawn’s in front of him:
a sly sideways blackbird pecks
and a bent twig moves like a compass needle. He’s breathing hard
with that indrawn rasp of concentration,
this outgoing whistle. Through tense lips.
Beyond this, beyond the view from the window,
is that further view in which the man
leans against the glass towards names and persons we don’t see.
He’s attached to them by filaments of painful attention
which they cannot break:
they’re a puzzle to him
and he works to solve them. Like the small-footed beetle
balancing its way from blade to blade.

Plato in Autumn

Who’d believe, meeting us now,
that once we saw daylight undress each other,

our skin smooth and cool as tiles.
That our breath stirred the leaves

in each other’s hair?

Mood Piece

after Verlaine

All the roses were red
and the ivy was all black.

Darling, that little shift you make
reawakens all my fears.

The sky was too blue, too tender,
the sea too green and the air too soft.

I always fear - this is what waiting is! -
you’ll abandon me horribly

and I’m tired of the hollybush with its varnished leaves
and the glossy box tree

and of never-ending countryside
and of everything that isn’t you!

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Bicycle Music*

Our bicycle music
is a thrum and rattle under summer trees.
It’s your knee thrusting, thrusting
a dark weight
against the weight of the green bicycle.
It’s my shoulder against yours,
yours mine,
so we don’t know who leans
as the bicycle jumps
a pothole, surfs a rut
and the little dog barks at us from behind his gate
and the flies below the trees make us a corona or two.

Good afternoon!
We’re students again
bowling along the city streets
you on the saddle and I on your crossbar:
and your breath is in my hair
for ever, for ever.

* In 2005, this will be on display along the Outpatient Oncology corridor on Level 2

New Year’s Eve

It’s dark and clear.
In each garden trees push against the sky.
Lighted windows, music.
As far as the eye can see
and further, out and out,
trees and people
push against darkness.
Each of us out on the furthest reaches
facing a giant sky.