Susannah Howard and Julia Miranda (eds),The things between us. Living words: anthology 1

Abstract

Susannah Howard and Julia Miranda (eds), The things between us. Living words: anthology 1, Shoving Leopard: Edinburgh, UK, 2014; 178 pp. ISBN 978-1-905-56524-5, £12.95 (pbk)

‘Its funny how you can go to a room

And leave yourself … ’

(from How I Am, p. 76)

This is a welcome poetic account of dementia. The voices recorded in the poems here give clear, stark accounts of human confusion and struggle, full of heart. They are moments from other people’s lives, often moments of difficulty, and they reach out to us with simple everyday words, describing complex, extraordinary dilemmas. It’s a book of kindness and careful listening. But it raises questions about the role of poetry in healthcare and about its own artistic vision.

The Things Between Us is a selection from seven years of poem-gathering by the Living Words project. Workers from Living Words engage people experiencing dementia in conversation and write down these exchanges in very loose-free verse. These pieces are then gathered into personal books for participants, which can be used as a communication bridge to other people, particularly carers and staff. I can imagine that they’d be wonderful ambassadors for reporting the tangled layers of human feeling. It’s hard enough to describe our inner lives in the ordinary way of things, but how colossal a struggle to describe a life with disease that eats at logic, memory and language itself.

‘I had a lovely story

But it took my - you know, when I found out

I couldn't talk mouth ways, like now,

I can't think.'

(from Into Words, p. 101)

Poems are often distilled stories, boiled down to essential details. They are efficient language-machines too, although they allow for huge ambiguity and invention, which makes a fit with the people represented here. For instance, the poem Static recounts the story of someone who is finding it difficult to breathe. Outside there is a tree, static on a windless day. The tree shifts in the breeze and with that shift, comes – perhaps – a moment of hope, sketched in one tiny lines.

‘The tree is moving.'

(from Static, p. 20)

It is here that The Things Between Us works best, as a gesture of intimacy. In our rush to fix the physical, the personal can be neglected. How often do the emotional needs of people get overlooked by the very people charged to make them well? Every human being needs to be seen and heard, as well as fed and medicated. Creative making can be an effective antidote to loneliness, depression, meaninglessness. The careful structure of a poem can be a precise yet flexible document of a life. After all, this is why we read poems, watch films, look at art – they let us into other lives, towards which we can lean for comfort, or wisdom, or company.

‘You think it lies with one person

But discover it lies with others

Because that's the part

The world is different.'

(from Machines, p. 12)

I did put a “But” in my opening paragraph and I'll now discuss a concern that the book raises. This is a concern about authorship. Authorship as ownership and authorship as craft. This is a book of conversations, written down by listeners, claiming them for poems. But there is no explanation of precisely how the poems were made, who the scribes were, nor what the artistic and ethical rules guiding these encounters might be. Did participants edit the pieces, re-work them, shape them beyond speaking them? How much do they really own them? Or are these actually collaborations and if so what is the power relationship between those involved?

I also have a concern about the nuts-and-bolts craft of these pieces, because the skill of the scribe links directly to the aim of giving voice to participants. Poetic form – which is always the fingerprint of a poet – is an unvarying one-size-fits-all free verse in this book. The form doesn't change from one person to the next, flattening individuality. Little notice is paid to tone, or rhythm of speech, or the verbal inventiveness that can accompany dementia. The artworks that accompany the words have not been made by the participants, their personal handwriting, drawing, human marks of any kind are entirely absent. Finally, there is no reference to contemporary poets who work at the borders of language, like Maggie O'Sullivan, Caroline Bergvall, nor a tradition of similar work, as trailblazed by TS Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Rimbaud, et al.

Aside from these worries, The Things Between Us is a book that deserves applause. It would be a good addition to the reading materials on offer at an early-onset dementia group. The fact that staff are closely involved in developing the books is excellent – and a model for other such projects. There are some limitations that damage The Things Between Us as a wider act of communication, outside its own community. But what does come through is the poignancy of participants' accounts and the generosity of the scribe/s who took note.

Books like this make us all better.