THE HOSPITAL
by Ben Barton

Our reviewer finds a brilliant collection of poems evoking both compassion and fear in The Hospital. 

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Ben Barton’s The Hospital is the kind of poetry collection you would like to feel remote from: to be completely unable to empathise with because it falls so far outside your field of experience.
 

Well tough.
 

Anyone who’s ever stepped inside a hospital – ever felt a flicker of worry about their health or the health of someone they love –will recognise with uneasy dread, the claustrophobic world Barton takes us too.

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The individual poems are great – often brilliant. But the collection is so much more than the sum of its parts. It takes you on the darkest kind of hospital visit where you lie beside – and sometimes within – the body of the patient. This isn’t a fleeting visit either; Barton makes sure you know you’re there for the long haul.

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There’s the macabre in Gas Panic – so early in the collection that when it grabs you by the guts, it’s sickening – the stuff of nightmares. And it doesn’t let up.

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In Warning Signs, Barton strips the language right back – no need for frills or fuss – a hospital is functional and he won’t let us forget it.

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Hospital food, the stench of disinfectant and the enforced proximity of men whose bodies are failing, make for an honest and oddly lyrical journey through this particular hell.

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Life is clearly a circle – the image recurs as Barton observes beginnings and endings in this strange sterile building: public witness to the biggest moments we humans can manage.

 

‘Birth and death served together

in one meal.’

 

Lullaby is a tender poem until the snake swallows its own tail. 360 is angry – the patient unavoidably involved in the last struggles of another. (See Zoetrope for angry too.) Patriarch is far gentler: a moving observation of the death of a father. In its unexpected ending, is it longing or loneliness our patient feels? Then there’s Colin’s Final Scene – so evocative and playful that I might laugh if it wasn’t so simple and sad.

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And yet somehow, sneaking in – slipping alongside the stark medical, the middle of the night despair, the disconnection, disconcertion and death – there is a tender hopefulness. There is salt and rain. A sharing of something human – something more than blood and bile. If you don’t believe me, skip to We Laughed Anyway, Friends or Never Born.

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Reading it for the first time in the park – vaguely grumpy after waking with a stiff neck – I found myself breathing in deep gulps of autumn air: kicking like a kid through the leaves. I’m not sick, I chanted softly. I’m not sick.

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But the nursing homes stared back at me. And the sirens told me Medway Maritime was just a stone’s throw away. Someone is. Someone is.

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And so, these poems evoke both compassion and fear. They flood through me until I feel the selfish pulse of healthy blood in my veins – the desperate affirmation of life. Fish and chips. Sex. A pounding race to the end of the street.

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Get it:

Ben Barton – The Hospital

Cultured Llama, October 2018

978-1-9164128-2-8.
Buy from Cultured Llama 
£10.00

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