Monday, July 23, 2007

Changing the Subject

I recently came across the work of poet Carole Satyamurti. This London-based writer does not shy away from difficult subjects. The seriousness of cancer is dealt with with a mixture of wit and courage in Changing the Subject. This collection of her work was published in 1990 and the title refers to a sequence of fourteen poems about a woman cancer patient's experience of discovery, diagnosis and treatment. In Out-Patients, she tells us, the doctor "reads my breasts like Braille, finding the lump I knew was there." And Diagnosis is sensitively handled, "He said/ cancer with a small c/ - the stuff of routine -/ yet his manner showed/ he knew it couldn't be ordinary for me." Satyamurti is a new discovery for me and I look forward to exploring her work further. You can find out more about her and her work here.






1 comment:

Unknown said...

She's fantastic, isn't she? We use her poems extensively on the Medical Humanities course. I love her poems about painting as well as the medically themed ones.