How might poetry help us articulate the body in illness, in work, and in love? Tiffany Atkinson's fourth collection includes the prize-winning sequence 'Dolorimeter', which takes fragments of speech and found text from a hospital residency to pay homage to the inventiveness and humour of patients and staff in a series of meditations on the notion that pain resists language. Away from the wards, other poems consider the strangeness of the workplace and the embarrassing incursions of desire into everyday life, celebrating the ability of poetic language to lay awkwardness and uncertainty alongside unexpected openings and glimpses of revelation. A lumen is a unit of light, but also a channel or an opening inside the body; perhaps, in this collection, it may also serve as a metaphor for the work of the poem itself.
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(@BloodaxeBooks, 25 February 2021, ebook, 80 pages, #ARC from the publisher via @edelweiss_squad and voluntarily reviewed)
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I've read and enjoyed the poet's work before so was looking forward to Lumen. I really enjoyed this collection. The Dolorimeter sequence is by far the best thing in this collection, a series of fragments in different forms which explore pain and illness. Lumen is worth reading for this alone. The best poems in this sequence are Heroin Works, Song of Pain, Found Poem II and A Bad Cold. I also enjoyed the other poems in the collection which explore a range of themes including illness, work and love. The best poems from the rest of the collection include In This Class, Consent. Hymn, Parable and Postscript.
