Poetry review – AFTER A SHORT ILLNESS: Sarah Leavesley admires John Whitehouse’s account of losing language as a result of a stroke – and then recovering it in new forms
After a Short Illness: A Meditation on Aphasia
John Whitehouse
Broken Sleep Books
ISBN: 978-1-918628-15-9
28 pages £9.99
Written in the aftermath of a stroke that almost severed the poet’s speech, After a Short Illness is a moving pamphlet focussing on communication and language (especially speech), along with other losses of various kinds and some wider realisations. It includes the nature, importance and difficulties of communication when elements of speech are gone and have to be relearned as well as possible and also explores the further losses that are connected with this experience.
One aspect particularly highlighted in the introduction is the speed of normal speech – potentially leaving an aphasia-sufferer adrift as both a listener and speaker, with past mastery of this fluency giving greater depth and sharpness to its loss. Thus “A Political Interviewer Remembers Speech” opens with ‘I thrill to remember speech. Flying above / curves of sound […]’ as well as ‘The algebra of altitude drugs me […]’.
Elsewhere, words are likened to rain hardening into hail, then machine gun bullets and ‘A brief blizzard of blank white syntax’ in “A Hard Rain”, where speech is also:
….a cheap accessory
stripped bare, a piano playing at the bottom of the lake.
Here, hospital workers’ fast ‘worthless utterances’ come in contrast to the ‘gold scales’ of ‘uncreated fish’ glinting from below the ice, as striking imagery and frustration jostle.
Meanwhile wit, rage and comic timing is an act likened to spinning plates on wooden sticks in “When I Was Holding Court”:
controlling the meaning of the words,
like a whiplash dancing before me.
But this is how things were before the narrator was reduced to silence, whipping a child’s carousel now instead for an ‘unsure’ audience as ‘It goes faster / and faster, whirring as it catches the air.’
Befitting the subject matter, these are image-rich, short, spare poems. Uncertainty is a strong new feature of the poet’s life, as is shown by the use of the verb ‘flicker’ across several poems, giving an overall sense that what was once there is sometimes still there, but can’t be relied upon.
This is not the only change that Whitehouse experiences.. Accompanying the loss of words is a loss of memories, as aphasia takes ‘a chainsaw to my history’ in “A Journal of a Stroke”. Tied up with this, or resulting from it, an even bigger loss lurks:
…Selfhood slides
away like snow, settling
on the animal skin of language. […]
(From “A Crow In My Room”)
And as “Privation” shows us, ‘All my fastenings to this life are undone.’.
Into these voids, however, new things have come: striking thoughts, observations, metaphors and lines. There is delight for After a Short Illness readers in the beauty of the sounds and imagery, as well as light touches that could be read as dry humour, both tempering and intensifying the poignancy.
In “What Is My Name?”, ‘My selfhood goes through / a tunnel, like a freight train‘. This poem closes with the narrator stuttering a reply to the title’s question with the words’ shape laid out as a joke with no punchline, whereupon the woman who asked the question loses interest and turns instead to a man who can speak well, ‘knows the gags, and who he is.’
Reading this poem, I recall the earlier “When I Was Holding Court”, but now adding further depth and contrast. The losses in these poems are charged with an awareness of what is at stake and an appreciation of language that might never be reached by those who’ve not been through Whitehouse’s experience.
“Naming The Animals” offers recognition not just of the difficulties of words for someone trying to re-grasp them but also a realisation that they are never a patch on reality. Words aren’t things but ‘slippery fish’ swimming away, very much in second place to the real world/experience they’re trying to capture.
We make do with loose change,
whirling coins to the light, until
thickets of meaning appear
through a cracked prism.
Although the pamphlet’s main context is aphasia, many of its elements may strike a chord for writers and those working with language in another way or caring for dementia sufferers. Loss of fluency is likened to being ‘an accidental foreigner’ (“Aphasia”) or on a motorway slip-road, cut out of conversation (“To Those Who Don’t Appreciate Speech”)..
Other moving poems concentrate on the loss of a brother and various obituaries. Whitehouse also widens the perspective from personal experience with biblical allusions, literary references and exploring other estrangements from language. This includes Baudelaire, silenced in an asylum, and a Second World War soldier, Zazetsky, who was shot in the head and used diaries to try to communicate and write himself back (“For Zazetsky”).
Like Odysseus, he creates the world through words.
This writing is my only way of thinking. If I shut these
books, I choose emptiness.
I think it’s significant that this is the opening poem: it:gives a wider context, it highlights what’s at stake, and perhaps it also allows that, no matter how hard things are, the situation might have been worse. It’s also inspirational for the reader as much as it may have been for the poet putting together After a Short Illness. Neither opening nor closing this pamphlet brings emptiness. For me, while the sense of loss lingers on afterwards, so too does the realisation of how lucky I am to still have the gift of words. More than this though, I’m filled with admiration for a poet who has turned such difficulties into something so striking, beautiful and moving.
Oct 14 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – John Whitehouse
Poetry review – AFTER A SHORT ILLNESS: Sarah Leavesley admires John Whitehouse’s account of losing language as a result of a stroke – and then recovering it in new forms
After a Short Illness: A Meditation on Aphasia
John Whitehouse
Broken Sleep Books
ISBN: 978-1-918628-15-9
28 pages £9.99
Written in the aftermath of a stroke that almost severed the poet’s speech, After a Short Illness is a moving pamphlet focussing on communication and language (especially speech), along with other losses of various kinds and some wider realisations. It includes the nature, importance and difficulties of communication when elements of speech are gone and have to be relearned as well as possible and also explores the further losses that are connected with this experience.
One aspect particularly highlighted in the introduction is the speed of normal speech – potentially leaving an aphasia-sufferer adrift as both a listener and speaker, with past mastery of this fluency giving greater depth and sharpness to its loss. Thus “A Political Interviewer Remembers Speech” opens with ‘I thrill to remember speech. Flying above / curves of sound […]’ as well as ‘The algebra of altitude drugs me […]’.
Elsewhere, words are likened to rain hardening into hail, then machine gun bullets and ‘A brief blizzard of blank white syntax’ in “A Hard Rain”, where speech is also:
….a cheap accessory
stripped bare, a piano playing at the bottom of the lake.
Here, hospital workers’ fast ‘worthless utterances’ come in contrast to the ‘gold scales’ of ‘uncreated fish’ glinting from below the ice, as striking imagery and frustration jostle.
Meanwhile wit, rage and comic timing is an act likened to spinning plates on wooden sticks in “When I Was Holding Court”:
controlling the meaning of the words,
like a whiplash dancing before me.
But this is how things were before the narrator was reduced to silence, whipping a child’s carousel now instead for an ‘unsure’ audience as ‘It goes faster / and faster, whirring as it catches the air.’
Befitting the subject matter, these are image-rich, short, spare poems. Uncertainty is a strong new feature of the poet’s life, as is shown by the use of the verb ‘flicker’ across several poems, giving an overall sense that what was once there is sometimes still there, but can’t be relied upon.
This is not the only change that Whitehouse experiences.. Accompanying the loss of words is a loss of memories, as aphasia takes ‘a chainsaw to my history’ in “A Journal of a Stroke”. Tied up with this, or resulting from it, an even bigger loss lurks:
…Selfhood slides
away like snow, settling
on the animal skin of language. […]
(From “A Crow In My Room”)
And as “Privation” shows us, ‘All my fastenings to this life are undone.’.
Into these voids, however, new things have come: striking thoughts, observations, metaphors and lines. There is delight for After a Short Illness readers in the beauty of the sounds and imagery, as well as light touches that could be read as dry humour, both tempering and intensifying the poignancy.
In “What Is My Name?”, ‘My selfhood goes through / a tunnel, like a freight train‘. This poem closes with the narrator stuttering a reply to the title’s question with the words’ shape laid out as a joke with no punchline, whereupon the woman who asked the question loses interest and turns instead to a man who can speak well, ‘knows the gags, and who he is.’
Reading this poem, I recall the earlier “When I Was Holding Court”, but now adding further depth and contrast. The losses in these poems are charged with an awareness of what is at stake and an appreciation of language that might never be reached by those who’ve not been through Whitehouse’s experience.
“Naming The Animals” offers recognition not just of the difficulties of words for someone trying to re-grasp them but also a realisation that they are never a patch on reality. Words aren’t things but ‘slippery fish’ swimming away, very much in second place to the real world/experience they’re trying to capture.
We make do with loose change,
whirling coins to the light, until
thickets of meaning appear
through a cracked prism.
Although the pamphlet’s main context is aphasia, many of its elements may strike a chord for writers and those working with language in another way or caring for dementia sufferers. Loss of fluency is likened to being ‘an accidental foreigner’ (“Aphasia”) or on a motorway slip-road, cut out of conversation (“To Those Who Don’t Appreciate Speech”)..
Other moving poems concentrate on the loss of a brother and various obituaries. Whitehouse also widens the perspective from personal experience with biblical allusions, literary references and exploring other estrangements from language. This includes Baudelaire, silenced in an asylum, and a Second World War soldier, Zazetsky, who was shot in the head and used diaries to try to communicate and write himself back (“For Zazetsky”).
Like Odysseus, he creates the world through words.
This writing is my only way of thinking. If I shut these
books, I choose emptiness.
I think it’s significant that this is the opening poem: it:gives a wider context, it highlights what’s at stake, and perhaps it also allows that, no matter how hard things are, the situation might have been worse. It’s also inspirational for the reader as much as it may have been for the poet putting together After a Short Illness. Neither opening nor closing this pamphlet brings emptiness. For me, while the sense of loss lingers on afterwards, so too does the realisation of how lucky I am to still have the gift of words. More than this though, I’m filled with admiration for a poet who has turned such difficulties into something so striking, beautiful and moving.