PBS Summer Recommendation Denise Saul reveals the inspiration behind her new collection The Room Between Us. Join now to read the full interview with Denise in our Summer Bulletin:
"Some of the poems in The Room Between Us can be considered as collaborative work. I recorded my mother’s experience of the speech disability, aphasia, in my notebooks and afterwards read aloud my observations to her. Roman Jakobson’s 1956 essay, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances” was a point of reference for my collection when I started to examine the relationship between brain trauma and speech.
I was mindful of my mother’s presence or voice in The Room Between Us. She gave her consent to the publication of any forthcoming poems about her experiences of post stroke trauma. At first, observations of aphasic disturbances appeared slowly as I tried to recuperate most of my mother’s aphasic voice and bodily experience."
Denise Saul is the author of two pamphlets, White Narcissi (Flipped Eye Publishing) and House of Blue (Rack Press) which were both Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choices. She is the recipient of the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize (2011) and a Fellow of The Complete Works. Denise holds a PhD in Creative Writing (poetry) from the University of Roehampton. She won an Arts Council England’s Grant for the Arts Award, for the delivery of her video poem collaborative project, Silent Room: A Journey of Language. This project can be found at www.silent-room.net.
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