A bit of a hiatus since my last post, largely due to seeing too much of hospitals over the last few weeks! However, with health issues hopefully looking to resolve now, it's back into harness and on with several waiting projects.
Sitting around in different wards and departments has given some food for thought though. Whilst most hospitals have a reasonable variety of art on their walls, brightening up otherwise cold and clinical environments, and at least giving patients and visitors something to look at, few hospitals seem to use poetry in any significant way. I've found the odd poetry book or pamphlet in hospital chapels but only at Neville Hall in Abergavenny have I seen lines of poems used decoratively. In Neville Hall lines from Owen Sheers "Skirrid" greet you, painted on the walls in Reception; stand outside the hospital and you can glimpse the mountain itself across from the town.
In recent years so much work has gone into researching the therapeutic uses of poetry. You may be familiar with the work of the inspirational John Fox and the Institute of Poetic Medicine in the States, or practitioners such as Victoria Field in this country; you may have comes across the annual Hippocrates poetry competition for poems on medical topics. I was delighted a few years ago to have a poem in an anthology for medical students about to qualify as doctors. But the idea of using poems formally or informally in the wider hospital setting doesn't seem to have really gained much of a hold. In a week that's seen a very successful National Poetry Day with events all over the country, perhaps it's high time to work on changing that situation.
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