Talking to the Dead - Softcover

Today Gordon Hodgeon can only communicate with the outside world by blinking at a Dynavox computer screen. Yet Hodgeon has continued to write, recording the changing seasons of his disability and the changeless seasons outside his window. Confined to his bed for the past five years following a series of unsuccessful operations on his spine, he is unable to move his arms and legs, and cannot breathe without the help of a ventilator. In the last few months he has lost the power of speech. The result is this extraordinary series of poems from the furthest edge of human endurance. Talking to the Dead is a book about disability and mortality, a painful study in helpless silence.

Gordon Hodgeon was born in Leigh 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 Mudfog Press. His previous books of poetry include November Photographs (1981), A Cold Spell (1996), Winter Breaks (2006), Still Life (2012) and Old Workings: New and Selected Poems (2013). He lives in Stockton-on-Tees.