The Guide

Sarah Keating: New poetry collection lifts the language of medicine and bodily fluids to art

Vital Signs, a collection on illness and healing from Poetry Ireland, connects clinical language with poetic description

In person: Vital Signs explores our shared experience as physical beings through the lens of illness or accident and healing. Picture: Getty

In his 1621 book The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton diagnoses the “excellent power [art] hath to expel many other diseases”. Through medical, psychological and physiological study, he celebrates the curative power of creativity. It is also, he argues, “a sovereign remedy against despair”.

The modern tendency of medicine, however, has been to draw a line between the body and mind, although contemporary wellness culture has reawakened popular interest in the relationship between our spiritual ...