Still Life - Softcover

Following a series of unsuccessful spinal operations in 2010, Gordon Hodgeon has been confined to bed and wheelchair, unable to move his arms and legs and unable to breathe for much of the time without the help of a ventilator. Coming to terms with a gradually narrowing view on the world, he found himself writing this book. Several of these poems detail the process he went through, some of them initially dictated to visiting friends or sympathetic staff in the rehabilitation unit in Peterlee where he has spent most of the last two years. Others were typed using Dragon voice-recognition software. Still Life 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. It is a book of leave-takings and goodbyes, a long look across the terrain of memory and the familiar landscapes of childhood, adult life, family and friends, as Hodgeon contemplates the lessons of life and love and the eventual loss of both. 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, the slow changing of the seasons through the hospital window and the strange music of the ventilator filling and emptying his lungs through the night.

Gordon Hodgeon was born in Lancashire in 1941. He has worked in schools, in teacher-education and in educational administration. From 1972 to 1996 he was a schools adviser in Teesside, later Cleveland. He was active for many years in NATE, in Northern Arts, Cleveland Arts, New Writing North and at Mudfog Press. His previous books include November Photographs (1981), A Cold Spell (1996) and Winter Breaks (2006). He lives in Stockton-on-Tees.