Poet Transforms The Breast Cancer Journey
by Jane Simpson · SCOOPJane Simpson’s new poetry collection, Imagined Scar, takes on the forbidding subject of breast cancer, both within her family and for women around the world.
Dr Simpson joins the few breast cancer survivor poets who have produced a full-length collection spanning the time being investigated, diagnosis, surgery, treatment and the family history of this disease. More than a medical journey, the book reaches beyond, to history, science and art.
Writing during the extreme isolation of lockdown, she found the early poems shifting from the bleak and lyrical to the quirky and humorous. Much to her surprise, the poems themselves transformed her cancer journey, which stretches back to her English ancestors and embraces the hope held out by genomics.
Acclaimed New Zealand poet, Elizabeth Smither, says: ‘The book is a remarkable journey where the startling beauty of the images lifts the clear-eyed poems into the first rank for lyricism and observation.’
Peata Melbourne, a breast cancer survivor and News Editor at Te Ao Māori News, Whakaata Māori, says: ‘Imagined Scar takes the reader deep inside the experience of living with cancer and brings new understanding of what cancer asks of a person, and of everyone who walks alongside them.’
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The ‘imagined scar’ of the title is the scar of every person facing surgery, of forebears living before life-saving surgery was available, and of scars that are real, but never seen.
Rami Rahal, an international cancer control leader, says: ‘In Imagined Scar, Jane Simpson transforms the breast cancer journey into a lyrical record of what medicine does not address: lineage, silence, fear, and the quiet labour of survival. Her clinically accurate and emotionally intelligent poems reveal how diagnosis reverberates across generations and through the fault lines of inequity. A beautifully crafted testament to navigating illness with dignity, clarity and uncompromising truth.’
As both a poet and historian, Simpson has created a medical autobiography which has a clear sense of progression. Given her family history of breast cancer, the chronology switches backwards and forwards throughout the book. Wider themes are interwoven, including mortality and survival, feminism and power, and motherhood and primeval memory.
Philippa Mercer, breast surgeon and past Chair of the Aotearoa NZ National Committee of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, says: ‘These poems are a reminder to family, friends and all who work in the assessment and treatment of breast cancer that words are potent. Words can be frightening yet also affirming. Health professionals who read this moving collection may be surprised at what they find as the story unfolds.’
Imagined Scar will be available from 12 October in selected bookshops and as an e-book and PDF.
About the author
Jane Simpson is a prize-winning poet from Ōtautahi Christchurch. After working as a journalist, she gained a PhD (Otago) in religion and gender in New Zealand, from 1939 to 1959. In 1993 Simpson became the first tenured woman academic in Religious Studies at the University of Canterbury. She taught the Christian tradition and new approaches to it, including feminist theology and post-colonial studies.
Imagined Scar is Simpson’s sixth book of poetry and her fourth full-length collection. Environmental themes and art wove together in her chapbook, Candlewick Kelp (2002) and in her collection, Tuning Wordsworth’s Piano (2019). A world without maps (2016) drew on her experience of teaching Muslim women English in a desert school in the UAE. She wrote and published The Farewelling of a Home (2021), a critically acclaimed liturgy written initially for people who lost their homes in the Christchurch earthquakes. Given the controversial nature of Simpson’s third collection, Shaking the Apple Tree: poems in response to sexual abuse by clergy in the Anglican Church, it came out under her own imprint, Poiema Books.
Simpson won second place in the New Zealand Poetry Society’s 2023 International Competition and was placed third in 2020. She was highly commended in the Caselberg Trust 2020 and 2021 International Poetry Competitions. Her poems have appeared in leading journals including Allegro, London Grip, Poetry Wales, Hamilton Stone Review, Meniscus, Catalyst, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook and takahē.
About the book
Simpson started to write Imagined Scar the day after her breast cancer diagnosis. Completely cut off in the Alert Level 4 lockdown, she wondered if there might be poetry collections by poets who could throw light on her own experience. With libraries shut, she searched online and found the collection Frissure by the internationally acclaimed poet, Kathleen Jamie, former Makar (National Poet) of Scotland. Jamie’s image of mapping her mastectomy scar onto the bend in a river spoke powerfully to Simpson, a long-distance cyclist.
The poems are medically accurate and often provocative. The breast before surgery is far from passive. It ‘speaks’ and has its own agency rather than being an object of male desire. Simpson, the breast cancer survivor, also writes as an historian. One poem evokes sculptors’ representations of the breast from ancient Greece, and another the changing breastfeeding practices in New Zealand in the twentieth century. Imagined Scar is about more than cancer. Interspersed are poems about the power of language in unlikely settings, and love poems to her son, to whom the collection is dedicated.
Breast cancer survivors who had read self-help books have been surprised to find that poetry could bring their experiences to life. Health professionals, including nurses, doctors, surgeons and geneticists have said the poems have made them think about their patients in new ways. Breast nurses from the Breast Cancer Foundation have said they look forward to the day when Simpson’s poetry collection would be in their patients’ hands.
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