Sharp Scratch is a slim volume of poetry by members of the creative writing group at the Maggie’s Centre in Manchester. Maggie’s is a charity that provides

free practical, emotional and social support to people with cancer and their family and friends, following the ideas about cancer care originally laid out by Maggie Keswick Jencks.

The first thing you notice about the volume is the quality of production. The paper, the typeface, the cover all give it a professional feel. Cancer is a serious business. So is writing and before you even open it this book is telling you to take these writers seriously. But what of the poetry? Is it therapy or is it literature? Yes to both. Sometimes a poem seems to embrace sentimentality or wishful thinking. But there is always an awareness and an honesty that rescues it. I am reminded of Dennis Potter, who knew a bit about cancer himself. ( He nursed his wife through her breast cancer while having pancreatic cancer and died nine days after her.) Potter used popular song in his TV plays. When interviewed by Melvin Bragg towards the end of his life he discussed this.

I wanted to write about the way popular culture is an inheritor of something else. You know that cheap songs so-called actually do have something of the Psalms of David about them. They do say the world is other than it is. They do illuminate. This is why people say, “Listen, they’re playing our song”, or whatever. It’s not because that particular song actually expressed the depth of the feelings that they felt when they met each other and heard it. It is that somehow it re-evokes and pours out of them yet again, but with a different coating of irony and self-knowledge. Those feelings come bubbling back.

I sense this in some of the poems. Sometimes the writer takes a memory or employs a theme that may appear trite or inconsequential and gives it fresh power. My only doubt is that, as a reader, I know these writers all have cancer. Without that knowledge would the words communicate that power themselves? I do not know. I do know that, taken as a whole, the anthology challenged me. If you know you are dying what do you write and why? We are all mortal but we conspire to forget that. We live as if we are immortal. these writers face their mortality every day with courage, wit and imagination.

The book ends with a quote by Deborah Levy.

At this uncertain time, writing was one of the few activities in which I could handle the anxiety of uncertainty, of not knowing what was going to happen next.

These writers know what is going to happen next. Yet still they write. Sharp Scratch is testimony to their heroism and their talent.

Declaration of potential conflict of interest. Katie Stanton is my daughter.