Jayne Stanton’s poems have appeared in print and online at Anthropocene, Ink, Sweat & Tears, London Grip, Pennine Platform, Skylight 47, The Amphibian, Under the Radar and other print and online magazines and anthologies. Her first pamphlet, Beyond the Tune, was published by Soundswrite Press in 2014. She has written commissions for a county museum, University of Leicester’s Centre for New Writing, UoL poems for International Women’s Day 2018, and a city residency. Jayne runs Soundswrite, an East Midlands network for women who are enthusiastic about all aspects of poetry. Her latest pamphlet, Have they marked you with arrows?, is newly published by Poetry Space.
About Have they marked you with arrows?, by Jayne Stanton
This strongly narrative and deeply personal body of work is the poet's creative response to living with uncertainty following her diagnosis and treatment for primary breast cancer. The poems give voice to the cancer patient's lived experience and its psychological and emotional legacy.
This strongly narrative and deeply personal body of work is the poet's creative response to living with uncertainty following her diagnosis and treatment for primary breast cancer. The poems give voice to the cancer patient's lived experience and its psychological and emotional legacy.
The opening poem is a swift dispensing with the "journey" word, though a journey this undoubtedly is. The poems are unapologetic in their honesty, defiant in their asking of questions to which there are no easy answers, and naming and shaming those oft-pedalled platitudes. Hope is to be found waiting in the wings, still learning its lines when it takes the stage.
You can read more about Have they marked you with arrows? on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection.
From Have they marked you with arrows?
Many-feathered
Hope is a scalpel in a steady hand.
There’s a point, somewhere
along an incision from axilla to areola
where Hope (who doesn’t know the lyrics)
starts humming the tune on a loop.
The patient is too far under
to appreciate the sentiment.
Hope is an evicted ductal carcinoma,
the rose that grows
in a pathologist’s petri dish.
Hope has clear margins.
To what’s left, it delivers
high-energy beams from a linear accelerator.
