Ghosts of Nightshifts Past

'Ghosts of Nightshifts Past' will allow readers to journey from a frenetic resus bay in A&E to the hushed corridors of a hospice, through the eyes of a nurse and poet. With both humour and humility, the author tells the stories of patients and staff alike, a rare window behind closed doors and curtains. 'Ghost of Nightshifts Past' is a unique first collection from a poet who just might change the way we think about nurses –
and the nursed.


Scroll down for more information about Nicole, reviews of her work and a video of the poet reading her own work.

The chapbook is available for pre-order here
and will be published in July 2025.

Nicole Durman, performing at Bourn Jammy
in 2024.

Photograph by Solid Imagery

Nicole Durman

Nicole Durman has lived in Somerset for over a decade, having moved from the USA in 2011.

She is a nurse, a prize-winning poet, and a current member of her local poetry group Fire River Poets.

Nicole has previously been published in Balancing on a Bootheel: New Voices in Poetry from Southeast Missouri, and in Lines in the Sand, an anthology of poetry and flash fiction.

Her debut collection, Ghosts of Nightshifts Past, is inspired by her career, which has spanned both A&E and hospice nursing.

In the video below, Nicole reads, “accident/emergency” from Ghosts of Nightshifts Past.

Reviews for ‘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.

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

There are two kinds of collection: the kind that takes its inspiration from all over the place and is usually held together with, often tenuous, thematic links, and there’s the kind that illuminates the various aspects of a single subject. Nicole Durman’s collection belongs firmly in the latter camp. This is the everyday life (and death) of a hospital ward, seen from the perspective of an obviously dedicated, but overworked, nurse.

These freeform poems often break up into short lines that mirror the hectic, one-thing-after-another nature of work on the ward as they career along like errant trolleys.

Understandably, there is never time for the hospital staff to get to know their patients intimately, so they are naturally referred to by bed number or ailment, something that comes across in the poems with comic effect (“one mental health picking at a tuna sandwich and one gallstone hunched double”)

A major feature of this collection is the striking imagery with which the poet clothes her experience. She speaks of a patient’s “collapsed-soufflé face”, another’s bared chest as a “blank canvas for violent electric art.” She watches another’s “upright form slump, a column of wet snow.” Lungs are “plastic bags floating on a soundless sea.” Preparing to take a blood sample, she sees herself as a “horror movie monster or mad scientist, tourniquet and gauze prepared, peeling back the blue curtain.”

The exuberant language of this collection, it’s apparent lack of gravitas in the presence of suffering and death might lead the less perceptive reader to suppose an absence of empathy. Nothing could be further from the truth. Only a real poet can embrace both humour and pathos in a single vision. Take this passage from Christmas in A&E, where the comical absurdity of the situation makes all the more moving the terrible finality of the last line:

“We untangle wires, fir tree LEDs

and ECGs, wear jingling reindeer antlers

that we don’t always remember to take off

when we speak to family, for whom December 25th

will always be marked separate by a blue curtain

whisked shut.”

Things necessarily become more sombre in the second, shorter section headed Hospice, and when we reach the Postscript, which consists of a single, rather disturbing poem called “This sickness will not end in death” there is a sudden change of voice from the busily observant nurse to that of a recently dead patient. Or is he? The title is a quotation from John 11:4. In this verse, Jesus is referring to the illness of Lazarus.  Does he mean the sickness will end not in death but in eternal life? Or does he mean that Lazarus will continue to suffer even after death. Lazarus managed to escape both fates by rising from the dead, but I doubt if our deceased patient will be so lucky. The unheard cry for help that ends this remarkable collection prompts the frightening question, “What if it’s possible to be technically dead and yet conscious?”

“Nurse — and no one hears me — nurse, I need help — my mouth a quiet dry

cave — nurse, I am in pain — for I feel my waking keenly — please help me

sleep again.”

Anthony Watts, Feb 2025

ANTHONY WATTS has been writing for nearly 50 years. He has had poems published in many magazines and anthologies in addition to five published collections: Strange Gold (KQBX Press, 1991), The Talking Horses of Dreams (Iron Press, 1999), Steart Point & Other Poems (John Garland, 2009), The Shell Gatherer (Oversteps, 2011) and Stiles (Paekakariki Press, 2019).

He has won the Bedford International Writing Competition 2019, Four Counties Poetry Competition 2015, Lake Aske Memorial Award 1978, the Michael Johnson Memorial Prize 1979, Poetry Pulse Poetry Competition 2015, the S.T. Coleridge Memorial Poetry Prize 2008 and first prizes in competitions run by Rotherham Metro Writers (2001), Preston Writers Guild (2001 & 2002), Christchurch Writers (1993, 2002, 2004, 2006, and 2007), Norwich Writers (2008), East Coker Poetry Group (2008), Dillington Poets (1994), Mungrisedale Writers (2013), Poetry Space (2013), Somerset Libraries (2013), Wax Poetry and Art (2017) and the Writers Bureau Limerick Competition (2016).
He was also longlisted in the Arvon Foundation Competition (19820 and the National Poetry Competition (2015). His poems have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and Somerset Sound.