ABSTRACT
For the past five-and-a-half years, I have been working in nursing homes throughout Britain listening to what people with dementia say. Where permission is granted, I write it down or tape-record the conversation and transcribe it later. All of these texts begin as prose; some end up as poems. At this stage, they exclude my words, which in any case largely take the form of affirmations and various kinds of encouragement. I do some editing. Where there appears to me to be a main theme, I exclude what I judged to be secondary material. It is unnecessary to inject a sense of poetry into these texts: many people with dementia, I have found, display an unforced propensity for metaphor and simile. It is as if the condition had unlocked their imaginative powers while at the same time inhibiting the capacity for logical thought. People with dementia appear to have an urgent need to express feelings that are occasioned by the onset of the condition and that otherwise might remain destructively confined within the psyche. I shall provide a number of examples, with discussion, and conclude with a few observations on procedure.
