Main description:

Exploring the potential of poetry and poetic language as a means of conveying perspectives on ageing and later life, this book examines questions such as 'how can we understand ageing and later life?' and 'how can we capture the ambiguities and complexities that the experiences of growing old in time and place entail?' As poetic language illuminates, transfigures and enchants our being in the world, it also offers insights into the existential questions that are amplified as we age, including the vulnerabilities and losses that humble us and connect us.

Literary gerontology and narrative gerontology have highlighted the importance of linguistic representations of ageing. While the former has been concerned primarily with the analysis of published literary works, the latter has foregrounded the individual and collective meaning making through narrative resources in old age. There has, however, been less interest in how poetic language, both as a genre and as a practice, can illuminate ageing. This volume suggests a path towards the poetics of ageing by means of presenting analyses of published poetry on ageing written by poets from William Shakespeare to Wallace Stevens; the use of reading and writing poetry among ordinary people in old age; and the poetic nuances that emerge from other literary practices and contexts in relation to ageing - including personal poetic reflections from many of the contributing authors.

The volume brings together international scholars from disciplinary backgrounds as diverse as cultural psychology, literary studies, theology, sociology, narrative medicine, cultural gerontology and narrative gerontology, and will deploy a variety of empirical and critical methodologies to explore how poetry and poetic language may challenge dominant discourses and illuminate alternative understandings of ageing.

Contents:

List of Contributors

Foreword Gregory Orr

Acknowledgements

Introduction: A Poetic Language of Ageing Olga V. Lehmann and Oddgeir Synnes
1. The Mother of Beauty: Notes on the (Possible) Poetry of Dementia Mark Freeman
2. Poetry and Dementia: Imagining and Shaping More Just Futures Aagje Swinnen
3. Time and Dignity: A Phenomenological Investigation of Poetry Writing in Dementia Care Oddgeir Synnes, Eva Gjengedaland Malfrid Raheim
4. Growing Older with Haiku: What Haiku Offers to Japanese Expats in Denmark Kyoko Murakami
5. Poetry Lasts Forever: Case Study of a 100-year-old Brazilian Poet and His Daughter Ana Cecilia de Sousa Bastos
6. 'An Old Man Can Do Somewhat': Styles of Male Old Age in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 2 Arthur W. Frank
7. Virtuous Ageing as a Poetic Endeavour: Motivations to Write and Effects of Writing among Older Adults in Norway Olga V. Lehmann andSvend Brinkmann
8. The Poetics of Growing Old: Metaphoric Competence and the Philosophic Homework of Later Life William L. Randall
9. Poetry, Science, and a Science of Poetry: With an Illustration of Poetry and Ageing Steven R. Brown
10. Writing Lives Merete Mazzarella
11. Other Voices: George Oppen, Dementia, and the Echo of Lyric Alastair Morrison

Index