‘All in all most of us are making good/recoveries’—Leaving Hospital and Recovering in Some British Contemporary Poems

Abstract

A selection of British poems all set in hospital, all said by a patient’s I-voice, provides us with a quite striking poetic version of how recovery may be experienced. The poems all suggest that recovering from a disease is not a rebirth, not a new start from afresh. Denise Riley, Liz Lochhead, Fleur Adcock, and Julia Darling poetically evoke how recovery (real, imagined or hoped-for) is negotiating a new path whose first stage is when the complying patient is discharged, formally allowed to leave the hospital and be delivered ‘outside.’ Yet, they subtly insist, the paths are ‘curved,’ disease has left ‘traces’ just as the disciplined experience of hospitalisation. Relying in part on Canguilhem’s main idea that the pathological is an occasion to invent new norms, and that recovery then is not starting again but starting differently, this article concludes with the analysis of a poem by Peter Reading which fiercely defeats all possibilities of new norms, be they existential or poetic.

Keywords

• F. Adcock
• J. Darling
• disease
• health
• hospital
• L. Lochhead