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Foreword

I used to joke that at the rate I wrote poems, I’d need to live until I was in my nineties before I had enough for a collection. Enough good ones, anyway. The only poem I felt confident to read in public was ‘Old Bird, Not Very Well’, written in 1999.

Fifteen years later, in June 2014, I was living in Room 212 of Parkside Hospital in London. I’d been living there for several months, camped in a recliner chair next to the bed of my wife Eva. She had multiple myeloma, an incurable cancer of the bone marrow, and was struggling not only with the illness but with the cumulative effects of six years of toxic treatment. Her second stem-cell transplant had failed and her body was a wreck.

Yet we had hopes that a new chemotherapy drug would reverse the latest relapse. With luck, she would get at least six months’ remission in which to go home, be reunited with the cats, tidy her affairs, sort through family photographs, maybe go on one last overseas trip to see her sons. I even imagined that she might survive long enough to benefit from new and ever-more-effective myeloma treatments as they were released onto the market in years to come.

It was in that brief period of wishful thinking that – at Eva’s suggestion – I read ‘Old Bird, Not Very Well’ to her oncologist. An optimist, as I suppose oncologists must be, he chose to see it as a poem about living as well as about dying. Eva wasn’t convinced. But anyway, poetry had entered that dismal, antiseptic room.

On June 27th, just nine days before Eva’s death, when the hope that her plasmacytomas might melt away was fading, I was sitting by her bed as usual. The neuropathy in her hands was so severe that she was unable to use the buzzer to call the nurses, so I was nursing her myself day and night, watching for every movement in the bedclothes, listening out for any murmur. But at this moment she was sleeping peacefully. On Eva’s laptop, at the bottom of an untitled Word document I’d been using for all sorts of purposes including a final copyedit of my last novel and drafts of emails to well-wishers, I suddenly wrote two poems, ‘Cowboys’ and ‘Nipples’. Both were alarmingly grim but imbued with whatever it is that poems must have in order to go deeper than the words.

I wrote only those two poems, and then it was time for Eva’s cancer to kill her.

Afterwards, as I tried to cope in a world that did not have my dearest friend in it, I wrote more. Sometimes none for several weeks, sometimes five in a day. I hadn’t known such need for poetry before. I wish I’d lived into my nineties, with Eva at my side, and never written these things.

Just three of the poems in this collection date from before Eva got sick; two from before I knew her. ‘Of Old Age, In Our Sleep’ is a recent rewrite of a poem I wrote in the early years of working professionally as a nurse. The original 1984 version was more contrived, showcasing the names of many obscure diseases; a 1996 overhaul was more concise, and the 2014 rewrite simpler still. ‘Old People In Hospital’ appears here exactly as I wrote it in 1984, when I was an observer rather than an insider.

The other poems were written throughout 2014 and 2015, and are arranged not in order of their composition but in their appropriate place in the narrative of losing and grieving for Eva.

Michel Faber

Fearn, 2016