Summer 2025 sees the forthcoming publication by The Artel Press of a collaboration between distinguished poets Prof Alan Bleakley (UK) and Dr Shane Neilson (Canada).
Their new collection The Cost of Living features over 60 new poems powerfully reflecting on suffering and recovery; a poetry mediated by the drama of their respective landscapes and a shared love of language.
Uniquely the works in the collection are gathered sequentially as a kind of dialogue inviting the reader into a thoughtful conversation between two insightful and highly skilled writers. The effect is intimate, absorbing and its success as a work of literature testament to their evident friendship.
Whilst the poetry is often confessional and raw, its power lies in a shared ability to transcend the self and speak universally through lines rich in the little details of life, love and the world about us. Bleakley acutely invokes his garden – ‘an exhumation of corpse-words revived as tenors: the interruption of a clump of bramble..‘, Neilson gently magnifies the moment – ‘Image of curve, hair, strand or curl with rosehip / familiar as red, only red that gently bends / where searches start and, if lucky, end..’
The collection throughout also reveals the authors’ professional expertise: Bleakley as psychotherapist and Neilson as physician. Few works of contemporary poetry can claim a vocabulary so emboldened by the science of a ‘demyelinated scream’ and ‘ragged telomeres’. Lay-readers can however simply enjoy the language of the poems, crafted by two pioneers in the therapeutic and educational potential of poetry & medicine.
Publication date: 10 May 2025
Alan Bleakley is Emeritus Professor of Medical Education and Medical Humanities at Plymouth University Peninsula Medical School (UK) and past President of the Association for Medical Humanities. He has an international reputation as a scholar in the fields of medical education and medical humanities and has published over 20 academic books. He is also a widely published poet, his recent collection The Bio-illogical was published by The Artel Press in 2024.
Shane Neilson is a Canadian poet, physician, and scholar who completed his Ph.D. in McMaster‘s English and Cultural Studies Department on the representations of pain. His 2017 book Dysphoria (PQL) won the Hamilton Arts Council Literary Award for Poetry in 2018. Recent titles include Saving (Great Plains Press), The COVID Journals (University of Alberta Press) and Carelanding (Routledge). In 2025 he will co-judge the Hippocrates Prize in Poetry and Medicine. X @Sneilsonwwh