Book launch

Tuesday 4 September
6-7.30pm

The Hawthorns Care Centre, O’Neill Drive,
North Blunts, Peterlee, Co Durham SR8 5UP

Following a series of unsuccessful spinal operations in 2010, the poet Gordon Hodgeon was confined to bed and wheelchair, unable to move his arms and legs and unable to breathe without the help of a ventilator. Coming to terms with a gradually narrowing view on the world, he began writing a new book of poems. Some were dictated to visiting friends and to staff in the rehabilitation unit in Peterlee where he has spent the last two years. Others were typed using Dragon voice-recognition software.

Still Life is the result. It is partly a study in disability and mortality, partly a praise-song for the ‘paralysed jellyfish’ of the quadriplegic body. It is a book about learning to live in a new element, about helplessness and loss. But it is mostly a book about living, a wonderfully energetic and sharply humorous celebration of the fact of being alive – the birth of a granddaughter, theslow changing of the seasons through the hospital window and the strange music of the ventilator filling and emptying his lungs through the night.

Paperback £7.95
Copies of Still Life are available from:
SMOKESTACK, PO Box 408, Middlesbrough TS5 6WA
01642 813997; info@smokestack-books.co.uk; www.smokestack-books.co.uk