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21st Century Poetry: Wading into the Light

JACK CARADOC recommends the remarkable poetry of an NHS worker that reflects on his experience in palliative and end-of-life care

Wading into the Light
by Mel McEvoy
Red Squirrel Press, £10

AS YOU walk or drive past the picket lines of hospital workers exercising their legal rights to strike (although for how much longer we don’t know, as the government seeks to curtail those rights) beep your horn and remember the community demonstrations of support for those same workers.

These are the underpaid, undervalued and under duress workers responsible for the comfort, kindness and care of people who are ill, broken and dying.

These people with their banners asking for fair wages are the same people from the front line of a worldwide pandemic who worked tirelessly, and even died on that front line.

While Downing Street held parties, these people held the NHS together. The poet in charge of the words in this book is one of those people.

Liverpool-born Mel McEvoy, of Irish immigrant parents, who were “grateful to live on a council estate,” has lived and worked in the NHS in the north-east of England for over 40 years and spent the last 20 years as a nurse consultant in palliative and end-of-life care.

The book’s dedication is “To health professionals who dedicate their lives to looking after dying patients and their families” and is an open door to the inner world and workings of a tragic, beautiful humanity in those final days, and to the light that can be gained from the emptiness of loss and grief: the release our essentially compassionate nature.

The poems here are of the highest order and, despite the subject matter, McEvoy imbues them with extraordinary humanity.

This is no polemic railing against injustice, but a quiet observational voice that guides us through the many endings, and from this the poetry derives its power.

The anonymity of “patients” is replaced by the voices of real people, living and dead, resonating with life against a backdrop of never-ending loss. These poems are never morbid: rather they search for meaning in the bleakest of situations.

The book opens with a glimpse into McEvoy’s personal history through the eyes of his grandparents, his “illegitimate” mother, who carries the stigma into her own life experience, and the tragic loss of a sister.

This is a stifled and repressive world of the past where children hear from other rooms of tragedy, breakdown and arguments, and reflects loss of all those lives.

The poet searches for meaning, doubting his own motivation, and asking unanswerable questions through the voice of his dead grandfather: “What do you know about any of it?”

The central core of the book, Sonnets from a Hospital Lift is a section of 15 poems made up of about 44 “loose” modern sonnets which the poet tells us are an attempt to “listen to the composite voice of a hospital.”

The poems work best when humanity shines through. In Sharp as a Needle, contact is made with the patient and the anonymous becomes a person. In Synchronicity where the last rites to a Hindu woman are given via a translator, and which we are glad to publish in the Star tomorrow.

My prescription for your curiosity is to go home and get this book, and read it in tandem with (the much missed) Julia Darling’s Sudden Collapses in Public Places, Arc 2003, that change perspective and give great insight into suffering and bereavement from the patient’s viewpoint.

Jack Caradoc is a writer, poet and publisher from the north-east of England who runs Dreich Magazine & Publications in Scotland.

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