Poetry review – HATCHERY: Pat Edwards admires the honesty and tenderness as well as poetic craft in Elizabeth Osmond’s account of work in a maternity ward
Hatchery
Elizabeth Osmond
V. Press
ISBN 978-1-0682701-2-3
34 pages £7.50
Before embarking on this review, I checked the meaning of its title and confirmed that a hatchery is a facility where eggs are hatched under artificial conditions. Often a title can speak volumes, and this one suggests the newness of life as something forced, manufactured, controlled. But read the dedication and you soon realise this book is about real human beings associated with a hospital, be they patients, parents or staff, and the poet writes about them with enormous care and respect.
Osmond goes to great trouble in her poem “Hatched” to explain the origins of the title, with its roots in Middle English, Old English, French, and she muses on alternative meanings such as “to concoct in secret”, to “hatch a plot”, to “chop up”, “make a mark, line or stroke.” Osmond is comfortable using couplets, white space, four-line poems, and clearly has a grasp of a wide range of forms.
The book takes many angles on the notion of baby production and the fact that it is dependent upon parents, clinicians, other hospital staff, luck, fate, all the big players in the universe. The people at the centre of giving care are just like you and me, have lives beyond the workplace, suffer from exhaustion and distraction. In “Newbie” the way the clinician mixes personal and work life until it’s hard to discern one from the other is beautifully imagined:
You thought you intubated
a difficult airway when in fact you applied eyeliner
in a dark smudge with all the medical students watching.
Then you put your laptop safely in the fridge.
Similar territory is explored in “Residue” where ‘Christmas lights are phototherapy.’
In “On the uses of pomanders” the medical terminology is playfully mixed with the more romantic mythology of ‘lavender for peaceful dreams…violet for faith’, because these things too are part of the culture and iconography of birth.
The poet shares her fascination with the sometimes bleak and troubling history of birth, from the description of babies ‘in a state of enfeeblement’ found in the Lancet, to the exhibition of preterm babies captured ’by an eccentric photographer.’ Osmond makes it very clear that babies arrive in their own time. In “I wish I could buy you a prescription for time” the baby is too early, ‘contractions have started at 23 weeks and the staff know they will have to administer meds, keep the room warm, and do their best for their ‘impatient little friend.’ As described in “Prognosis”, the outlook may range between ‘moderate or good’ and in “The Tiny Nappy” this will be ‘smaller than the smallest panty liner – you cannot find one in Tescos.’
The poet is deeply aware of the inequality that can exist in the levels of care in different situations – obstetrics is often political and may even be a bit of a lottery. However, she strongly defends her profession which is clearly under the cosh in an underfunded and under-resourced NHS. In “Doctors in Difficulty” Osmond riffs on the word ‘difficult’ much as Helen Mort does in her poem about ‘difficult’ women (acknowledged by Osmond):
It is said in London you
are never more than six feet away from a difficult doctor/be on your
guard/there could be one at your scrub sink/taking offence at
harmless banter about sexuality or race or some other woke thing.
This pamphlet uses procedures, protocol, best practice, as useful structures around which to build poems, but it is always personal, human, and emotionally connected. In “Conversation” this humanity is so evident, a clinician talking to the baby in the incubator telling him ‘the ventilator is the ocean/rushing in and out.’ She tells him ‘we all once were stars’ and that ‘when he grows up/he could do anything.’
Osmond sides with the mothers in the NICU in “Spaced Out”. She has empathy when they have endured episiotomy, cannula insertion, stitches, anaesthesia, morphine, and the long wait to hold their babies ‘skin to skin.’ The poet has time for the dads too, ‘one hand holding a phone with a waning battery, the other a syringe of colostrum.’ And what does everyone need after an operation, a procedure, a hard shift – white bread toast…strong tea, bag left in’?
I much admire {and think we all should} that Osmond is not only a highly qualified neonatal consultant but also a prize-winning poet. It is wonderful she is able to shine a light on the realities of her important work using the medium of poetry. She does so sometimes using shock tactics and great realism, but also with deep tenderness. She knows that her profession has always been under scrutiny, and dead babies seen as specimens to be gawped at in museums, so she sets the record straight and reminds us of the sacrifices made by many to protect new lives and provides us with a sense of hope.
Oct 2 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Elizbeth Osmond
Poetry review – HATCHERY: Pat Edwards admires the honesty and tenderness as well as poetic craft in Elizabeth Osmond’s account of work in a maternity ward
Hatchery
Elizabeth Osmond
V. Press
ISBN 978-1-0682701-2-3
34 pages £7.50
Before embarking on this review, I checked the meaning of its title and confirmed that a hatchery is a facility where eggs are hatched under artificial conditions. Often a title can speak volumes, and this one suggests the newness of life as something forced, manufactured, controlled. But read the dedication and you soon realise this book is about real human beings associated with a hospital, be they patients, parents or staff, and the poet writes about them with enormous care and respect.
Osmond goes to great trouble in her poem “Hatched” to explain the origins of the title, with its roots in Middle English, Old English, French, and she muses on alternative meanings such as “to concoct in secret”, to “hatch a plot”, to “chop up”, “make a mark, line or stroke.” Osmond is comfortable using couplets, white space, four-line poems, and clearly has a grasp of a wide range of forms.
The book takes many angles on the notion of baby production and the fact that it is dependent upon parents, clinicians, other hospital staff, luck, fate, all the big players in the universe. The people at the centre of giving care are just like you and me, have lives beyond the workplace, suffer from exhaustion and distraction. In “Newbie” the way the clinician mixes personal and work life until it’s hard to discern one from the other is beautifully imagined:
You thought you intubated
a difficult airway when in fact you applied eyeliner
in a dark smudge with all the medical students watching.
Then you put your laptop safely in the fridge.
Similar territory is explored in “Residue” where ‘Christmas lights are phototherapy.’
In “On the uses of pomanders” the medical terminology is playfully mixed with the more romantic mythology of ‘lavender for peaceful dreams…violet for faith’, because these things too are part of the culture and iconography of birth.
The poet shares her fascination with the sometimes bleak and troubling history of birth, from the description of babies ‘in a state of enfeeblement’ found in the Lancet, to the exhibition of preterm babies captured ’by an eccentric photographer.’ Osmond makes it very clear that babies arrive in their own time. In “I wish I could buy you a prescription for time” the baby is too early, ‘contractions have started at 23 weeks and the staff know they will have to administer meds, keep the room warm, and do their best for their ‘impatient little friend.’ As described in “Prognosis”, the outlook may range between ‘moderate or good’ and in “The Tiny Nappy” this will be ‘smaller than the smallest panty liner – you cannot find one in Tescos.’
The poet is deeply aware of the inequality that can exist in the levels of care in different situations – obstetrics is often political and may even be a bit of a lottery. However, she strongly defends her profession which is clearly under the cosh in an underfunded and under-resourced NHS. In “Doctors in Difficulty” Osmond riffs on the word ‘difficult’ much as Helen Mort does in her poem about ‘difficult’ women (acknowledged by Osmond):
It is said in London you
are never more than six feet away from a difficult doctor/be on your
guard/there could be one at your scrub sink/taking offence at
harmless banter about sexuality or race or some other woke thing.
This pamphlet uses procedures, protocol, best practice, as useful structures around which to build poems, but it is always personal, human, and emotionally connected. In “Conversation” this humanity is so evident, a clinician talking to the baby in the incubator telling him ‘the ventilator is the ocean/rushing in and out.’ She tells him ‘we all once were stars’ and that ‘when he grows up/he could do anything.’
Osmond sides with the mothers in the NICU in “Spaced Out”. She has empathy when they have endured episiotomy, cannula insertion, stitches, anaesthesia, morphine, and the long wait to hold their babies ‘skin to skin.’ The poet has time for the dads too, ‘one hand holding a phone with a waning battery, the other a syringe of colostrum.’ And what does everyone need after an operation, a procedure, a hard shift – white bread toast…strong tea, bag left in’?
I much admire {and think we all should} that Osmond is not only a highly qualified neonatal consultant but also a prize-winning poet. It is wonderful she is able to shine a light on the realities of her important work using the medium of poetry. She does so sometimes using shock tactics and great realism, but also with deep tenderness. She knows that her profession has always been under scrutiny, and dead babies seen as specimens to be gawped at in museums, so she sets the record straight and reminds us of the sacrifices made by many to protect new lives and provides us with a sense of hope.