Samuel Tongue

So there is a kind of practicality to writing in this couplet form, this kind of longish poem written in couplets.

It really feels like this could have been written there in the chemo room and that we're there while it's being written.

It feels that kind of fresh,

Another point that came up when we were thinking with this poem was how little, yeah, it wasn't really about acceptance, but it also wasn't about kind of a doomed, that kind of doomed poet, that voice.

which is going to be lost.

It was a kind of well-won wisdom, I suppose, or hard-won wisdom, whilst also questioning.

So there wasn't this sense that the poet had got to a point of acceptance and calm and still exploring, still wanting to know

about the beautiful things that can be seen in a single second and how you can blow up a second like a balloon and fit infinity inside of it.

There's still that questing that the poet's mind is trying to achieve and trying to follow.

this gave us a sense that this is more complex, of course, much more complex than merely accepting a kind of calm acceptance.

It's a lively continuing exploration and that writing and continuing to write is how to live, is to continue living.

And another of the aspects that was key to this feeling, overall feeling, was that there was a community, again, inside this poem.

So we're in the chemo room,

But there are other patients there.

There are Jenny, who's asked that when people, and again, eminently quotable, Jenny, who says when people ask if she's out of the woods, she tells them she'll never be out of the woods, says there is something lovely about the woods.

And that kind of humor and pathos that comes in just feels real.

So there's another patient in there, and then there's another patient's wife who was full of so much hope, she looked like a firework above her husband's chair.

We felt, again, as we were working our way through the poem, that Gibson is just so good at writing stories

honestly, and about the absolutely singular aspects of going through this process, but going through it with a community.

So it's particular, it's singular, but it's also communal.