Historiography in modern poetry: text, imagination and authority in the work of David Jones, Geoffrey Hill and Ian Duhig; and King Harold: a long poem in three parts

This thesis explores how modern poetry is shaped by its relationships with academic and historical texts. Occasioned by creative writers’ increasing involvement in the academy, it considers the consequences of this relationship for contemporary poetry praxis. Through close readings of David Jones’ Anathemata, Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns and Ian Duhig’s The Speed of Dark, it explores how imaginative conceptions of poems relate to and are affected by their material presentations as texts. In so doing, there is a particular focus on how paratexts translate academic models of authoritative writing into their poems. This thesis addresses a number of key questions: how do modern poets express ideas about the past? How do their borrowings from academic and scholarly texts shape this expression? Do readers’ past experiences have an impact? Taking the work of critics Jerome J. McGann and Linda Hutcheon as its starting point, it develops new approaches to these questions through a synthesis of their ideas and applying these issues to the particulars of poetry composition. It opens new avenues of relevance to modern poets, connecting contemporary poetry criticism with textual studies. The creative component of this thesis makes a parallel treatment of these critical issues in King Harold, a long poem on the multiple literary lives of Harold Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon king. My poem dramatises the tensions explored in the critical component, creating an exciting and original bricolage of academic and historical paratexts. Both the critical component and the creative writing element of this thesis illustrate the impact of academic textual production on modern poetry

Looking for the “Little Things”: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach to Medicines Monitoring for Older People Using the ADRe Resource

As prescribing has become the dominant modality of medical treatment, the “pharmaceuticalization” of practice has often resulted in treatment “at a distance”, with doctors having limited contact with patients. Older and poorer people, who are socially distanced from medical prescribers, suffer more adverse drug reactions (ADRs) than the general population. This paper advocates a team approach to checking patients in care homes systematically for ADRs, using information from manufacturers’ guidelines. It explains the benefits of medicines monitoring to protect older patients from iatrogenic harm, such as over-sedation and falls. The ADRe profile is a sophisticated paper-based check-list, which helps nurses and carers play an active role in monitoring signs symptoms that indicate problems. Better monitoring allows doctors and pharmacists to adjust prescribing and respond to identified ADRs. We argue that Implementation of tools like ADRe can be accelerated by changes to the regulatory regime and better inter-professional cooperation