N
eurological Birdsong is a collection of 300 short poems or, maybe, a long poem with 300 stanzas in 26 sections, composed by Writer-Neurologist Andrew Lees.
There is unquestionable literary merit in Lees’ recommendation of John Clare, the 19th century naturalist and peasant-poet. The latter’s directness and his great powers observation resonate in Lees’ poems. Indeed the collection’s title, Birdsong, conjures up Clare’s poems and his life in rural Northamptonshire.
While the stanzas of Birdsong don’t necessarily have Clare’s remarkable and understated clarity (no pun intended), some come pretty close.
I particularly recommend the section on Parkinson’s disease, where Lees is most convincing in championing ‘actual’ biological science and, above all, in championing the direct doctor-patient relationship. I also liked the final section, which deploys snow as a metaphor – with all the potential for new insight and contradiction that metaphor brings. Snow ‘makes me calmer not slower.’ Snow ‘reveals and conceals’.
Birdsong of course is seen best as an anthology of florets of neurological wisdom. But its wisdom is not all clinical. And its wisdom is sometimes controversial. However, as a succession of insights from one of the great pragmatic, communicating, thinking Neurologists, it is a volume that we can all treasure.
