Where I'd Watch Plastic Trees Not Grow

by Hannah Hodgson

Hannah has taken her regular hospitalization due to serious illness and made it into astonishing poetry. Her world of the hospital is sometimes like a zoo, sometimes like a gallery and sometimes a crowded town square. The wards contain tigers and crows, butterflies – doctors become poets, the dead turn into an art installation, while outside, the trees are plastic – as unchanging as Hannah’s shielding days that ‘drag like a foot.’

But between the pulled curtains of these words the details of real-life amongst the terminally ill are depicted in full colour. A daughter ‘cries neatly in a corner’ while her mourning father spins ‘his wedding band around his finger.’ Nurses fill ‘carrier bags marked ‘patient’s property’,’ while ‘the industrial plastic’ crinkles as a body is lifted from bed to trolley in its bag.

The poet’s eye feels unblinking at times – unable but also unwilling to blink. How could it when it has so much to show? These poems are heavy with import, but they are light with the liveliness of art that is beautifully rendered.

Genres: Poetry

32 pages, Poetry Pamphlet

First published February 18, 2021

About the author

Hannah Hodgson is a poet and writer living with life limiting illness. Her work has been published by BBC Arts, The Poetry Society and Ambit, amongst other outlets. She is a recipient of a 2020 Northern Writers Award for Poetry. Her first poetry pamphlet ‘Dear Body’ was published by Wayleave Press in 2018; and her second, centred around life with serious illness, was published by Verve Poetry Press in Feb 2021. Her first full length collection is due to be published by Seren in February 2022. Her website is www.hannahhodgson.com. Her Twitter and Insta handle is @HodgsonWrites

Reviews

[robyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The GP rang this afternoon / trying to talk about a DNR order. I refused, / instead told him about starlings murmerating / and all the living I have left to do.”

lovely, melancholy, haunting. honestly don’t have much else to say about it because it’s a very short collection and i am a Poetry Idiot but i’m definitely eager to read more of hodgson’s work !

[Maia · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's good. It's serious and it's about real life experience and suffering, which always bias me towards things, but apart from that the writing is good. It's slim, and it's not "great" - she is too young to be amazing. But I bought it outright, rare for me, and worth it.

[Steph · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely a stunning collection of poems!

[Imi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really had to take my time reading this one. May write more another time.

[Erin Franklin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very short but emotional collection. Nothing felt like filler, and it was really interesting to read a collection so focused on one particular slice of time and place in the poet's life.