I’ve just finished reading Paula Green’s recently published poetry collection, ‘The Venetian Blind Poems’ in one sitting. This book was an oasis in the midst of a hectic time for me (when is life ever not?); it’s not very often I can be compelled to sit for more than half an hour currently. Yet I connected with this on so many levels: as a writer, as a doctor, as a patient, as a friend, as a human. Green details her experience on the Motutapu ward, the bone marrow transplant/haematology unit at Auckland Hospital, where she received a bone marrow transplant for a life threatening  blood disorder in June 2022.

As a haematologist, I know this is one of the most challenging treatments you can put a patient through, bringing someone to the brink of death to save a life. Recovery takes months, sometimes years. The acute phase can be akin to torture, one only the recipient could ever understand. But Paula holds us close, so that we can begin to understand: ‘I return to the pain box in Dune… I am using the box/for when my ulcerated mouth pain is unbearable/last night I held the box/as the mouth pain radiated but/I didn’t put my hand in/I decorated the box/ with seashells instead’. And then we are elevated from the abyss to the sublime, because this is how Green survives, by stacking poems along her windowsill and creating word pictures in her head: ‘Buttered toast and clover honey/marmalade brain and mandarin heart’. And then, time and time again, we are brought back to the world that Green sees, from the confines of her isolation room, peering through the Venetian blinds at the world that sustains her, one second, one minute, one day at a time.

This book had me captivated from the delicious first line ‘Liquorice strips of harbour’, throughout the rough seas, eddies, near-drownings and becalmed harbours of the stem cell transplant, and beyond, right through to that hopeful last line, ‘We will be able to see for miles’. Kia kaha, Paula Green, your inner strength knows no bounds.