A. J. Lees, "Neurological Birdsong"

 

Andrew Lees was born on Merseyside and is a Professor of Neurology at The National Hospital, Queen Square and University College London. He is in the top three most highly cited Parkinson’s disease researchers in the world and included in Thomson Reuters 2015 List of the Worlds Most Scientific Minds. He has written the authorised biography of the Arsenal and Liverpool football player Ray Kennedy who developed Parkinson’s disease in his early thirties (Ray of Hope, Penguin 1994) and which was made into a television documentary, Liverpool the Hurricane Port (Random House 2011) a book about his home city, Alzheimer's: The Silent Plague (2012 Penguin) and William Richard Gowers (1845-1915) Exploring the Victorian Brain, a biography of William Gowers. His book, Mentored by a Madman: The William Burroughs Experiment (Notting Hill Editions) published in 2016, explains his unlikely association with the author of Naked Lunch and his curiosity to find neurological cures. Brazil That Never Was, an investigation of saudade, was published by New York Review of Books in the USA. Lees's quest for a new viewpoint in the Amazon led to an unlikely linkage with Ciro Guerra’s film Embrace of the Serpent and a joint presentation with him at the premiere at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. His previous book, entitled Brainspotting: Adventures in Neurology, was published by New York Review of Books in April 2022 and was a plea for a return to soulful compassionate medicine. Lees has also written essays published in Dublin Review of Books, Literary Review, Empty Mirror, Tears in the Fence, The New York Review of Books, The Polyphony, and the Scottish Review of Books. He is a free thinker who has dedicated his recent years to reminding the scientific community that medicine is an art and that literary and science fiction can inform understanding.

About Neurological Birdsong

In Neurological Birdsong, Dr Andrew Lees documents a career’s worth of insights into neurological practice by reformulating his most profound tweets into poetic form. The aphorisms collected here touch on a host of related topics, from the right approach to diagnosis to the importance of a "soulful neurology" in the art of healing. They will interest everyone: the suffering patient, the young doctor or nurse, the medical administrator. Neurological Birdsong is the beautiful expression of one doctor’s wisdom.

You can see more information about Neurological Birdsong here. Below, you can read a few sample aphorisms. 

From Neurological Birdsong, by A. J. Lees

Favourite Twoosh's and Twaikus

 

18. 

You cannot reduce the clinical picture

to a series of scales and tick boxes,

administered by health care professionals

who have not been taught clinical skills during their training.

54.

The medical history is part of the romance.

We must keep a patient’s life close to our souls.

Science underpins modern medicine but healing is an art.

73.

The daily practice of neurology strengthens the mind 

But it is by attending,

and in the art of healing,

that it becomes soulful,

as well as stimulating.

147.

Question everything,

dissent,

and if necessary fight back.

No blind obedience.

No e-patients.

No life-threatening rules.

Do what you know is right.

273.

Last week in the Vega

I understood that Lorca had seen,

in his torn-up garden,

the same green winds and roses of blood,

that Cajal had described,

deep in the human brain.

Peter Thabit Jones, "A Cancer Notebook"

 

Peter Thabit Jones has authored sixteen books. He has participated in festivals and conferences in America and Europe and is an annual writer-in-residence in Big Sur, California. A recipient of many awards, including the Eric Gregory Award for Poetry (The Society of Authors, London) and the Homer: European Medal of Poetry and Art, two of his dramas for the stage have premiered in America. His opera libretti for Luxembourg composer Albena Petrovic Vratchanska have premiered at the Philarmonie Luxembourg, the National Opera House Stara Zagora, Bulgaria, and Theatre National Du Luxembourg. Further information is on his website here. 

About A Cancer Notebook, by Peter Thabit Jones

From the Foreword, by Patricia Holt

In A Cancer Notebook, Peter expresses, viscerally, purely, his emotions and thoughts while he is living with the reality of cancer. Being a poet, he does so in a way which can be integrated into another being directly, shattering the isolation, and giving each person a better understanding and acceptance of what they are going through - a precious step toward healing, emotionally and physically. This is the profound gift of Peter’s book. The poems are such a totality, each word adding to the whole, building within themselves to an integrated power and poignancy. 'Women’s Ward' and 'Words' are two such poems, among many others.

From A Cancer Notebook

The Bird in the Garden

Over two weeks
Since New Year’s Eve
And the word the surgeon said
Won’t leave. My thoughts try
To break through the ice of it.

I carry a bit of death for now -
Until it's removed. January
And a dunnock bird sits
In the swaying round feeder,
Unbothered by the cold breeze
Of a grave, grey winter, He pecks
At the hard, dry pool of seed.
I smile at the beauty of him.
He warms my emotions.
I love the positivity

In his need to survive.


Women's Ward

Midnight. I pass the women’s ward,
As I struggle, so slow, to the men’s room.
I momentarily think of their possible
Pains, maybe the loss of the features
Of their womanhood, the scars they
Will own for the rest of their lives.

The moon has always tracked their days,
Decided their mothering blood.
The ages enslaved them to kitchen
And bed, denied them the schooling seeds,
Denied them the flourishing voices
Of men. I pass their ward again.

'The eternal note of sadness'
Is always with us, it seems, unsettling 
Our lives and all that we are as humans.
Sleep well, sisters, caught by this thing 
Called cancer, and may your journeys
Be one to a safe and long future of wellness.

Note: 'The eternal note of sadness' is a line from Matthew Arnold’s poem 'Dover Beach.'


One Man's Notebook

Four weeks since my surgery.
What deep songs can I pull up 
From the well of my experience 
Of this thing called cancer?

I check my scar, healing to a crisp 
Dryness. Confined to my home
For now, unable to lift heavy things,
Restricted physically, I feel like a man

Stood at a crossroad with a number 
Of signposts. Will I ever be the same 
Again, after tasting a droplet of death?
Words have been the religion of my life,

The worship of their weights and sounds.
My mind pulls up emotions from the bright
Bottom of the strangest of months.
The splashes of inspiration will become

Phrases, lines, stanzas, and then poems,
One man’s notebook trying to record
The imagined and challenging road 
To a place I’m told is full recovery. 

Sarah James, "Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic"

Sarah James is a prize-winning poet, fiction writer, journalist and photographer, also published as Sarah Leavesley. Her poetry has featured in the Guardian, Financial Times and Poems of the Decade 2011-2020: An Anthology of the Forward Books of Poetry 2011-2020, as well as in a café mural, on the BBC, on buses and in the Blackpool Illuminations. She is the author of eight poetry titles, an Arts Council England-funded multimedia hypertext poetry narrative > Room, two novellas and a touring poetry-play. Winner of the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine 2020, the manuscript for Sarah’s latest collection Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic (Verve Poetry Press 2022) won the CP Aware Award Prize for Poetry 2021. In her spare time, Sarah is a keen walker, cyclist and swimmer, especially enjoying nature outdoors. Meanwhile, her spare room is home to V. Press, publishing award-winning poetry and flash fiction. Her website is here.

About Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic

Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic is award-winning poet Sarah James’s exploration of forty years living with type one diabetes, a life-threatening autoimmune condition that is now treatable, but remains incurable. The collection tracks her personal journey from diagnosis, age six, to adulthood, including the high and the low points, as well as the further long-term health risks lurking in the background. These are poems of pain, but also of love and beauty, taking in motherhood, family, nature, aging and establishing self-identity in a constantly updating world. The route to some kind of acceptance and belonging may be troubled by ‘trying to escape’ but it also ‘holds / more light than your eye / will ever know.’ The manuscript for Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic won the CP Aware Award Prize for Poetry 2021 and the collection is available from Verve Poetry Press here.

From Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic, by Sarah James

Thick-skinned, Thin-fleshed

on diabetes type 1

In the old young days: piss
          on diastix, and a glass syringe
twice the length of my palm.

On the children’s ward, I practised
          on thick oranges. Pushing a needle
through the fruit’s peel was so

unlike the ice-cold sting
          of pressing it through my own
thin-fleshed skin, the weight

of glass in my hand, pushing
          the plunger home. This sterilised
in my mum’s special saucepan,

while I played houses, and childhood.
          Later, lighter plastic for injections,
then a cannula and pump.

Blood tests now, for precision.
          Fingertips pricked to a scarred
numbness. For thirty-five years,

the red of life with a glint of steel.
          Each needle’s point etches
my mind; my body’s rubbed hard

by time. I carry the condition’s
          sharp sweetness in my blood;
its other daily stabs as invisible

as genetics. My fingers are a scabby
          black braille of blood-test marks,
and the smell of man-made insulin.

This wet dependence is survival.

Promise

He starts with a well-placed breath,
hint of a tingle blown gently
across the nape of my neck.

And again. I am a mouth-organ
with many quivering reeds;
silent vibrations amplify inside.

One by one, he un-hooks each bone
of my spine, lower, lower,
and still no lip-touch, no kisses, not

a single brush of finger on skin,
but oh, the soft rush of air,
the slow – fast, fast – slow press

of his presence. I breathe
seduction in.

Along the Edge

Living beside the canal towpath, every day brings doorstep birdsong, frogs and the water’s glisten, pulling me closer.

Moorhens snip the surface; a swan ruffles up a lace dress with her feather-stitched wake towards her reed-moored nest. Shimmering light hides the fast paddling beneath, the deeper flit of fish, and other sunken secrets – rusted metal re-sculpted by weed.

This evening, the hedgerow is a chorus of bird chatter and May blossom. Snazzy bulrushes and tall grasses sway to the late hours’ slow jazz.

As I watch from the footbridge, the sun’s touch warms my skin: a thin layer of amber silks across everything still within the day’s reach.

Here, I’ve no need for frog-princes – the canal carries my love without spilling.

Before night seals over, time skips a single heartbeat. It’s just long enough for me to lift my arms like wings, and dream the ease of quiet flight: rising as high as a whooper swan, looping and curving with the water, but always returning to this, my reed-moored home.

                                                                                     sleep is a ripple
                                                                                     of unseen breaths; a lone owl
                                                                                     hoots through the darkness