POEM OF THE WEEK NEUROPATHY

In 2014, Tiffany Atkinson spent two weeks interviewing doctors, nurses and patients at a hospital in Aberystwyth. Those conversations inspired “Dolorimeter”, a wonderfully inventive sequence from her forthcoming fourth collection Lumen. In “Dolorimeter”, Atkinson often observes the different people that she meets at one wry remove: a consultant with a bad cold who “keeps hitting the roof of himself ”; or the smokers outside the building, huddled like “gods of an old world… [who] weave incessantly their smouldering threshold”.

This poem from the same sequence is more personal, more painful – though “painful” isn’t quite the right word. Rather than “pain and all its gaudy wagons”, its subject is something quieter; a muted numbness. The poet draws a parallel between her “subdue[d]” but uncomplaining father and Father Damien, the 19th-century Belgian saint; both robbed of feeling in their fingers (one by neuropathy, the other by leprosy), both outwardly stoical, yet inwardly suffering.

Tristram Fane Saunders

Is it odd that eighteen months into his treatment

Dad’s neuropathy

(collateral from chemo no sensation in his fingertips or feet

and irreversible he cannot do his buttons sense the dog’s fur

or stay on a bicycle)

subdues him more than all the Gormenghast of cancer? He’s

an army man pragmatic as a horse and he dislikes how I mythologise

It’s true that in his illness

I have found a way of daughtering that falters as he rights himself

but this is not King Lear nor pain and all its gaudy wagons but the dusty silence after

First rule said a triage nurse

the shouter isn’t necessarily the worst-off Pain’s

a vital sign Look for the one who’s drawn himself in like a stone Look

for the one (from convent Sunday thirty years ago

I’ve dredged up Father Damien ‘the lepers’ priest’) who

at the story’s turn delivers implacably

the sermon on caritas

with one hand spitting in the altar candle’s

flame