Riddance
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On Valentine’s Day, 2006, Anthony Wilson was formally diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system. ‘Beginning with what happened’, the poems in Riddance chart the progress of his treatment for this disease, from initial diagnosis to the uncertain territory of remission. Even more essentially, they recover and celebrate all that is most fundamental and affirming about the act of living.
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On Valentine’s Day, 2006, Anthony Wilson was formally diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system. ‘Beginning with what happened’, the poems in Riddance chart the progress of his treatment for this disease, from initial diagnosis to the uncertain territory of remission. Even more essentially, they recover and celebrate all that is most fundamental and affirming about the act of living.
For Afterwards
I want it kept simple,
I want to leave one part
of the congregation
thinking they witnessed
a jazz improvisation,
another they attended
a poetry reading
and another that a sermon
wasn’t preached at all—
the kind I long to hear still,
including a story
about a boy and a boat,
a mention of the Prodigal Son,
and a metaphor
concerning train drivers.
I’ll have no wisdom
from the other side.
I direct you instead
to the cracker-jokes
buried in my best suit,
the postcard I keep
for emergencies, blank
but for the words:
‘That green notebook
was a good time of life.’
Published: 1 November 2012
ISBN: 978 1 905208 16 6
Pages: 127
“Riddance deserves to be in every oncologist’s waiting room” – Judi Sutherland, Irregular Features
“Anthony Wilson is devastatingly direct and unsentimental about illness and death. At the same time – miraculously – he is exuberant, irrepressible in his celebration of life, complete with all its complexities and compromises. These are courageous, beautiful and fiercely intelligent poems.”
Jean Sprackland
“This is a remarkable book – modest but ambitious, unguarded but clear-eyed and crafted, it doesn’t present a life under pressure so much as an embodiment of life in poem after generous-minded poem.”
Peter Sansom
Anthony Wilson is a poet, writing tutor and lecturer at the University of Exeter. His books of poetry are The Afterlife (Worple Press, 2019), Riddance (Worple Press, 2012), Full Stretch: Poems 1996-2006 (Worple Press, 2006), Nowhere Better Than This (Worple Press, 2002) and How Far From Here is Home? (Stride, 1996). He is also the author of a prose memoir, Love for Now (Impress Books, 2012), detailing his experience of cancer.
Anthony has held writing residencies at The Poetry Society, The Times Educational Supplement, The Poetry Trust and Tate Britain, and he works as a tutor for the Arvon Foundation. He is editor of Creativity in Primary Education (Learning Matters, 2009), and co-editor of Making Poetry Matter (Continuum, 2013), and The Poetry Book for Primary Schools (Poetry Society, 1998).
His research is in the field of writing in education. In 2010-12 he was a co-convener of the ESRC Seminar Series Poetry Matters. In 2011 he compiled Creativity, Confidence and Challenge, a research report with Bath Festivals’ The Write Team on the impact of creative writers in schools.
He can be found online at www.anthonywilsonpoetry.com
