Ghosts of Nightshifts Past

"Nicole Durman’s compelling collection takes us on a vivid tour of spaces in which lives teeter.  Whether set in A& E or in the hospice – where the cared for (and cared about) patients and colleagues are paramount – the poems embody the empathy, self-questioning, and sheer precision of a nurse practised in measuring, observing and noting details.  Here is the medical context of ECGs, dosages and procedures set alongside powerful evocations of human vulnerabilities and pressures of time: a constant walking on brinks.  In this deftly accomplished debut, Durman’s powerful directness of language and depth of vision never fail to keep the reader riveted."

Kate Griffiths

About Katie:

Katie Griffiths grew up in Ottawa, Canada, in a family originally from Northern Ireland.  In 2024 she was awarded the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize. She is author of The Attitudes, published by Nine Arches Press, and the first-prize winning pamphlet My Shrink is Pregnant from Live Canon. She won second prize in 2018’s National Poetry Competition, and in 2016 was published in Primers Volume One by Nine Arches Press. 

Lazarus, risen from the dead, and Lachesis, Greek goddess of fate – shears in pocket, haunt the corridors, wards and rooms of this collection in two parts, hospital A&E and hospice. God as intimate Friend hovers in the wings. A startling collection, that throws us headlong into a world of mysterious phenomena, procedures and medical terms. A nurse's biting humour and objectification of patients defends against the indignities of damaged and dying bodies, icing over a substantial tenderness, while the numinous keeps insisting itself into the foreground:

You don't know what eternity is.

I've glimpsed it. Gripped its narrow handle.

The space of a moment between swallows.

Hélène Demetriades

About Hélène:

Hélène is a poet and psychotherapist living in South Devon. Her debut collection, ‘The Plumb Line’ was joint winner of the Hedgehog Press Poetry Collection Competition 2020. She studied English Literature at Leeds University, and trained and worked as an actor in her twenties. She has been widely published in poetry magazines, anthologies and webzines. In 2022 she won The Silver Wyvern, Poetry On The Lake, for a single poem, (judged by Robert Seatter). She has been short-listed in the Bridport, long listed in the National, and highly commended in the Fool For Poetry Chapbook Award, (Munster Literature, all in 2023.

Ghosts of Nightshifts Past grips the reader from the outset.

Each poem is like a beautifully constructed short film that brings a medical episode or patient to vivid life, immersing us in the front line of an expert nurse’s world and – thanks to the poet’s skill - taking us on journeys beyond.

The voices in these poetic bulletins from A&E and the hospice are grounded in gritty reality and simultaneously open out to mythopoeic dimensions.

We face first and last things thanks to Nicole Durman’s unflinching, compassionate eye.

With not a trace of sentimentality her experiences become ours.

Graeme Ryan

About Graeme:

Graeme Ryan is a playwright, teacher and prize-winning poet whose acclaimed debut collection Valley of the Kings came out in 2022. He is a member and online MC for Fire River Poets and judges the annual Page is Printed poetry competition in Taunton.

‘This must be open heart surgery, surely’ by Matt Brydon

Ghosts of Nightshifts Past: a nurse’s poems, from A&E to hospice, Nicole Durman

Nicole Durman’s debut Ghosts of Nightshifts Past tracks the initiation of a nurse who pledges to ‘give it six months’ as she learns the ropes but soon becomes so inured to the world of the hospital that she no longer quite belongs to the land of the living.

The pamphlet is divided into two sections ‘a & e’ and ‘hospice’ and each has a subtly different mood. By the pamphlet’s close, her hands long to return to simply being hands, and to ‘retire from complex tasks.’ It is a privileged position to be in, as we eavesdrop on her interactions with patients and staff. Rituals and surreal episodes abound, all filtered through the semi-coded language of hospital efficiency and communication made blunt through exhaustion and pain.

At first, she is taken aback by the vividness and turbulence – ‘a swirling wheatfield my hospital.’ Before long, however, she is expertly administering to a daughter and mother, imagining the latter ‘sliding fingers through soft little girl hair, making it shiny with the / tears and sweat of motherhood.’ She is un-judgemental, even in the knowledge that the patient will self-harm again.

Nature gathers around the hospital, whether the owls filling a child’s ears at story-time or the stranded gull whose weeping punctures the ward. The nurse learns to soothe, to shoulder her role as ‘hundreds of red-tipped beaks snip the air, begging to follow her home.’ In this place of heightened emotion, Ovid seems a natural presence – the husband stationed at his wife’s bedside transforming into an armchair in the corner, a tree growing from beneath a flagstone.

This is a world in which everything commingles and is brought to bear. Amidst the LEDs and ECGs and strangely beautiful terms for illness and pain relief – anaemia, analgesia – we find references to Lot and the Fates. There is a tug between a sense of tradition (the word hospice derives ‘from the Latin hospitium, / the divine duty of the host’ we are informed) and the particularities of lived life. The result is a heightening of feeling in which, for example ‘Sharp scratch’ sits beside ‘moth cocoon lips’. It is as if the nurse’s professional gaze slips and their poetic sensibility kicks in.

The cultural references can sometimes be felt in passing, as in ‘Christmas in A&E,’ in which we follow the nurse’s footsteps ‘fast and foremost as a baby’s heartbeat.’ At other times, the contrasts are more surreal; such as when the systemic rhythm of ‘pulling dark venous blood / pushing IV antibiotic into trapped veins,’ results in ‘three semi-precious tubes, deep warm / pigeon blood rubies’. The different worlds (of faith and medicine, personal and professional, childhood and adulthood) overlap:

Wrap wrap tie

Wrap wrap tie

thinks the nurse stitching a wound and it becomes ‘a nursery rhyme.’

Unsurprisingly, the poems touch on existential questions. What is the essential, we might ask after a patient’s limbs are severed and the patient’s body, incapable of raising food to its lips, seems to consume itself (‘Orobouros’)? What kind of resolution might be appropriate for a person who spends New Year’s Day in a hospice?

At times, the nurse comes to question her own role. She might verify a time of death (with its cruel pinch of the trapezius to test for feeling) but she is at pains to deny it is she who decides when it is someone’s time to go:

How long is a piece of string? I didn’t cut it

but found it this way. Examined the frayed end.

The job comes at a personal cost. Swollen fingers mean her ring rests ‘unrung’ on the bedside table after work and she longs to attend to her baby. At other times, she finds an equanimity within her role: ‘There are worse things than working on Christmas,’ she tells us. ‘We say grace over gifted biscuits.’ The moments of calm are palpable, most lyrically in the poem which gives the pamphlet its title:

Tonight, a still sea.

Stealing a glance at your unfurrowed brow — sleep,

the brother of death — I float, secure on your muteness,

unburdened by ceaseless platitude-yearning. “It’s not fair.”

“No, it isn’t.” It’s why oxycodone was invented.

A 3am cup of coffee, sincerely made,

is standing by at the nurses’ station.

Watch the steam rise, the ghosts

of nightshifts past.

( from ‘Pump check in room 8’)

By the time we close the pamphlet, we have travelled so far into this liminal world with our nurse that we are almost on the other side. ‘Postscript’ details a figure who is at once the resurrected Lazarus and the nurse leaving a shift, coins clattering from her eyes as she blinks into the daylight. Feeling ‘a braggart, a fraud,’ even as she walks away she is aware of the hand that ‘reaches for the call bell.’

With this fresh, scintillating debut, Durman has produced an immersive collection that doesn’t just take us to the edge of life in A&E and hospice, but positions us there till we too can hold our nerve in the face of human extremes and find purpose in our role. The fact that this seems a world as yet uncharted in poetry is testament to the totality of its calling – requiring a kind of levitation on the writer’s part as she simultaneously attends patient, family and pen. For this service as guide she is to be applauded, if only because, as she says, ‘I refuse / to let you bump your head / in the dark.’

Matt Bryden’s first pamphlet Night Porter won the 2010 Templar pamphlet prize. His full-length collection Boxing the Compass was published by Templar in 2013. More recently, The Glassblower’s House, winner of the 2023 Live Canon pamphlet competition, is an exploration of fatherhood against a background of personal catastrophe. A keen classicist, while studying for a Master’s degree at Goldsmiths, University of London, Matt wrote a long essay on Christopher Logue’s War Music that was nominated for the Arthur Terry award for writing that links history and literature. 

In addition to running national poetry competitions for young people, Matt has been supported by the Arvon Foundation, the Poetry Society, the Betjeman Society and the George Orwell Foundation. Matt has assisted numerous young writers in finding their voices. His online interactive Poetry Map, designed to prepare GCSE students for the Unseen Poem question, won an honourable mention at the 2018 Electronic Literature awards. Matt’s poetry has won the William Soutar prize, the Charroux Memoir prize and, in 2018, a Literature Matters award from the Royal Society of Literature for Lost and Found, a project that steps through the Lost Property Office at Bristol Temple Meads to re-emerge amidst the Greek Underworld.