A Hospital Odyssey is an outrageously imaginative voyage through illness and healing. Drawing on the most recent biomedical research into stem cells and cancer, the poem is a journey through the body's inner space and the strange habitats created by disease, including the chimeras people see when they're unwell. Maris, whose husband, Hardy, has been diagnosed with cancer, is separated from him. Her mythical journey leads though a surreal landscape, peopled by true and false physicians, god-celebrities, rabid statues, diseases hunting healthy bodies and a microbes holding their annual ball. The Otherworld is located in the hospital's basement. In her desperate search Maris meets and converses with Aneurin Bevan, founder of the NHS. Immensely readable, A Hospital Odyssey is a modern epic: Dr Who meets Paradise Lost. The poem asks: what is health? And what does it mean to care for someone who's ill? Gwyneth Lewis's dramatisation of A Hospital Odyssey was broadcast as Radio 4's Afternoon Drama on 26 June 2014.
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Product Details
Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
Publication Date: 28 Jan 2010
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Publication City/Country: United Kingdom
Language: English
ISBN13: 9781852248772
About Gwyneth Lewis
Gwyneth Lewis was Waless National Poet from 2005 to 2006 the first writer to be given the Welsh laureateship. Her first six books of poetry in Welsh and English were followed by Chaotic Angels (2005) from Bloodaxe which brings together the poems from her English collections Parables & Faxes Zero Gravity and Keeping Mum and by A Hospital Odyssey (2010) and Sparrow Tree (2011) winner of the Roland Mathias Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year) in 2012. Her other books include Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book about Depression (Flamingo 2002) and Two in a Boat: A Marital Voyage (Fourth Estate 2005) and The Meat Tree: new stories from the Mabinogion (Seren 2010). Her Welsh collection Y Llofrudd Iaith (Barddas 2000) won the Welsh Arts Council Book of the Year Prize and her English collection Keeping Mum was shortlisted for the same prize. Both Zero Gravity and Keeping Mum were Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Gwyneth Lewis composed the words on the front of the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff opened in 2004. In 2014 she dramatised her book-length poem A Hospital Odyssey for the BBC broadcast on Radio 4's Afternoon Drama and delivered her Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures published in Quantum Poetics (Bloodaxe Books 2015). She lives in Cardiff.