Description
A life-threatening illness obscures the future, resulting in a focus on the present and an expansion and savouring of the past. In her debut poetry collection, Christine Cochrane uses her writing room to explore the experience of living with ovarian cancer, following her diagnosis in 2015. Convinced of the importance of creative work and distraction in helping those living with periods of cancer treatment and remission, she embarked in 2016 on the Open University’s MA in Creative Writing, where many of these poems were developed. Room is a combination of personal memoir and a meditation on serious illness and the rooms and spaces of life, weaving together themes of growth and decay, darkness and light, sadness and laughter.
‘a keen sense of how poetry connects with other arts and with life itself’
– Chris Powici
‘poems encompassing emotions, memory and a love of place, all written with a clear eye and heart’
– Geraldine Green