Each piece drew me in and left me, afterwards, with something – an astounding image, a feeling of shock, a heart-punch, a wondering or questioning. Spring in the Hospital is a profoundly accomplished poetry pamphlet.
Mab Jones
These erudite, immaculately crafted poems yield not a binary digit or a terabyte to sentimentality of any kind. The spirit of Hill presides, but the poems are very much their own: they are razor-sharp and speak with a startling clarity and confidence. Spring in the Hospital is an outstanding debut, and Luke Palmer is one to watch.
Tim Liardet
Spring in the Hospital won the 2018 Prole Pamphlet Prize, judged by Mab Jones.
You can buy the pamphlet from Prole’s online shop here, or via the contact page here.
You can read Neil Fulward’s review at Litter Magazine here.
Here’s a few poems from it:
Things I Cannot Ask my Brother-in-Law about his Car Crash
did a sudden lightness | loss | slip in the steering wheel
charge the crash like lead in your gut | did it jump or
drop right through your arsehole to the seat | did you
brace for impact | sink in unwittingly | when all
routine | speed | rain became weight | became gravity
lurching with glass spray | road spray | light caught
around a black hole | when it sucked glass into your arms
| folded your brain into itself | landed you in a ditch | were you
even there when they cut you out | did you hear | far off
| the animal moan of your sister | we drove that same road
after you | the last grain of her unable to recognise
our daughter | did you know that | do you know why
in the family room by the trauma theatre there are pictures of sunsets
A Fine Hospital
The hospital is here!
Every morning new types of coma bloom
I can hear them in the grass
Trees too are waking to the hospital
The first bud of each coma splits their bark
In the valley the river sings hospital
You were dead on your way to the spring
In the deepest flower on the flower scale
Sometimes the smell of a coma overwhelms me
It’s like the hospital is in my gut
We must be thankful for all these beautiful comas
I can’t remember a better hospital
Certainly it’s the finest on record
There has been so little rain except at night
We look out of the spring’s windows
wonder if you’ll ever leave this flower
If every hospital was like this one
we’d want for nothing
Every day I put fresh-cut comas in a vase
It seems a shame that each coma wilts
browns and dies
But there are so many more to be picked
If I could bottle this hospital
I would
and bring it to you
lying in the spring
inside a flower
Defected in the Car Park
I know I’ve left the lights on
before I try the dead ignition
First day back at work
I wait slack-eyed
parked under three idiot lime trees
their silent arms a sprung rack
mute and proudly nude
The trees’ blank weight
looms in every mirror
I open the door
stand beneath the spire
of their unloaded limbs
In the spun twigs’ church the buds are rising
red like a blood-birth
their rims flushed pink caked
around fleshy leaves
All the way to their hearts
the trees spawn peel
their own husks back
sprout
through the scar tissue
a new growth
Luke Palmer 