Melanie Jansen @ Earp Distilling, Newcastle
Dr Melanie Jansen returns to NSW in November, with a launch at Earp Distillery in Newcastle.
Melanie is a paediatric intensive care specialist. All That Could Be Lost, Melanie's debut collection, will take you to the frontlines of the heart. It leads us into domains of experience to which most of us are strangers, and make us think about what it is like to be there; and to think about them, as Yeats urged, not with “the thoughts men think in the mind alone” but with thoughts felt “in a marrow-bone”.
The ability to fuse thought and feeling, to simultaneously be deeply involved in her subject and to stand outside of it, is characteristic of Melanie’s work. It is most conspicuously so in those poems drawn for her professional life as a paediatric intensive care specialist, in
poems like “Some Days the Air is Soft” and “Breaking Bad News”; in lines like “grief swathes them is wretched splendour.” But the same skills—and values—are evident in the poems that arise from her personal life. The sense throughout is of a powerful intelligence with a deep commitment to living an “examined life”. This is coupled with a capacious, tough-minded sensitivity, which does not shirk or pretend, but confronts, subsumes and transcends.
“Sometimes”, Melanie writes in “Finding the Lyric”, “I feel full of words but cannot form them”. Fortunately for us, she has formed them often enough to fill this very impressive debut collection with poems that, as Fiona Reilly has said “will pull you into dark places and simultaneously lift you out of them”.
You can listen to Melanie's moving reading of "Breaking Bad News" by clicking on the button below. But please bear in mind that this is a tough poem dealing with grief and loss before you decided to do so.
While documenting these harrowing hospital experiences is an important part of Melanie's work, it is by no means her whole canvas. Alongside these poems of sorrow are poems of wonder and joy that celebrate experience of found love, and of motherhood.
You can register here for Melanie's reading at Earp Distilling Co here.
But if you can't make it, and are interesting in getting to know Melanie's work better, the book is available from our online store—or ask for it at your favourite bookshop.
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