The hospital ward is often where the heart sinks – a place steeped in pain and unspeakable grief. However, Romalyn Ante, a Filipino-British practising nurse in the NHS, offers another side to this familiar tale. In her spellbinding meditation on love and loss, hope is less “the thing with feathers” and more the thing with forceps – prescribing metaphors like medicine from a hospital drawer.
The collection starts with the heartbreaking stories of day-to-day life in a British clinic, including the chaos of Covid-19 frontlines. One woman hangs herself from a hospital rail. Later, a teenager jumps from a viaduct and another boy, certain he can never be healed, decides to drink bleach:
We are salted with the knowledge
of what it’s like for a life to be at stake.
Ante’s medical instinct extends towards the natural world: a crimson moon becomes a blood clot whose light dissects skeletal leaves, scar-tissued soil and the “cardiac flutter” of ferns. It is a delight to diagnose the world in such a visceral way. Her poems throb vigorously with life. Yet the vision of this poet shimmers anything but clinically white. In fact, the collection blooms with a kaleidoscope of colour – often tropical in the turbulent memory of typhoons and tsunamis. Ante dwells in the bioluminescence of plankton, peregrines and patchouli, asking the unruly persistence of nature to provide an antidote to the pressures of medical life.
It is a magical follow-up to her debut collection, Antiemetic for Homesickness (2020), featuring nymphs, hexes and shape-shifting rams. Mythology holds a magnificent presence as the poet’s alter ego becomes a many-breasted goddess called Mebuyan in Filipino legend. While Mebuyan nurses the spirits of departed children, Ante extends this favour to words.
Throughout Agimat, language holds the power to harm – “like an arrow” that “pierces through the flesh of the afternoon”. Its violent capacity is painfully clear in the poem [In Transit], recalling the racist vitriol that spread with the virus “in a town that hasn’t learned/to love us back”. What is special here is the power that language holds to heal, like the precious “agimat” the poet keeps close.
This amulet of protection is given to some Filipino children by their parents based on a mystical faith in its ability to “deflect bullets” and “unbloom wars”. The pendant becomes a prism for exploring “the magic that lives” inside language, and it is fascinating to see the mouth foam like a cauldron as “words bubble like potions”. The anaesthetic haze of mistranslation and word-slippage conjures up the most captivating promise of this collection:
I will chant until every wound
seals, and no child knocks,
Nurse, I cut myself again
Ante’s agimat is carried alongside the more abrasive gift of inherited grief for the “distant yet deafening war” that haunts her family in the wake of Japan’s wartime occupation of the Philippines. It is impossible to forget the aunt who mistakes two bombshells for rocks, sets them as a stove before limbs scatter into the trees – one hand still clutching the ladle.
It might be unsettling to picture a nurse with a notebook, mythologising such memories of pain. But this project is not gratuitous. Instead, I felt grateful for the tender attention the poet affords to a hope that many of us hold dear: that as patients – that as people – we may amount to more than just flesh and bone. Thankfully, in the hands of Romalyn Ante the human self far exceeds statistics and the subtotal of all its scars.
Agimat by Romalyn Ante is published by Chatto & Windus (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
[Evening walk, Wednesfield]
I navigate this light-pricked town;
my shadow skims on pavements –
rain-embossed leaves,
fox-eyed alleyways.
I reach the tunnel of tulle-purple fog
and my thoughts flicker like the canal waters.
As the hour deepens, I wonder how far
this heart can listen.
