Vital Signs by Martin Dyar – The anthology that converted me from being indifferent to poetry

Vital Signs: Poems of Illness and Healing

Author: Edited by Martin Dyar

ISBN-13: 978-1-902121-90-1

Publisher: Poetry Ireland

Guideline Price: €24

Let me start with a confession: until recently I was a poetry agnostic.

By that I mean I had no interest in poetry; I have never purchased a book of poetry and interestingly, as a teacher of narrative-based medicine, I was firmly focused on prose as the best way to hear and interpret patients’ stories.

This obvious lacuna in my narrative endeavours never registered with me. But that all changed when I was given this anthology edited by poet and academic Martin Dyar. As well as offering a key to the nature of medicine and the formation of doctors, the collection is also a humane account of patient experiences. Those seeking a personal understanding of illness and healing will be rewarded.

I was moved by Patrick Kavanagh’s The Hospital, where the poet writes of his experience of lung cancer, including the opening line: “A year ago I fell in love with the functional ward of a chest hospital”.

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Anthony Boyle: ‘My dad had to go to Gaelic training, and the same British soldier would throw his kit in a puddle every day’

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Bowel cancer: ‘I truly know what it means to live and am genuinely loving life’

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[ Poem of the Week: And Now the Babies ]

Kavanagh was a patient in St Kevin’s hospital, the precursor to the current St James’s, where I was a medical student and an intern more than 30 years ago. My memory of every ward in St James’s was their egalitarian functionality, a memory revived by Kavanagh’s words.

A line from the poem Instead of Dying by Lauren Haldeman also leapt out at me: “Instead of dying they inject you with sunlight and you live”. What a juxtaposition – evoking such powerful imagery – while dispelling the gloom often associated with end-of-life care.

And Bernard O Donoghue’s Ter Conatus immediately transported me back more than 30 years ago to a house call I did as a locum GP in rural Sligo. I can still remember an older brother and sister, living in extreme isolation, and how their uncertain efforts to deal with her serious illness were bound up in their long dependency on each other:

“Three times like that he tried to reach her.

But being so little practiced in such gestures,

Three times the hand fell back, and took its place, unmoving at his side.”