Making Dolmades
in Essex
If you would like a signed copy of the Making Dolmades in Essex collection, please contact me below and I will provide you with payment details.
£10.99 including postage and packing (uk)
Proceeds to be sent to Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders
Making Dolmades in Essex is Judith Wozniak’s first full poetry collection. Raised in Essex in the second half of the twentieth century, with skilled poetic imagery she recalls her family’s origins in the coal mining valleys of Wales. She takes the reader back to the days of childhood, adolescence and young adulthood — we share some poignant memories, and others that are irrepressibly optimistic and affectionate, in poems that are by turns intimate, wry, humorous and coolly meditative.
“In this delightful and very moving collection, the poet reveals herself to be an expert in the art of poetry and time travel. The pages crackle with so much life and precise detail of the pasts they describe, that to read them is to step into these rooms to share these moments. The poet offers us charm and wit, introducing us to Kenfig Hill's first motorbike and sidecar, and a 1970s Morris Minor whose doors fly open like wings. But the poems hold also such emotional power - sadness stored in the gaps between 1950s boarding house beds, doctor's bills paid with money saved for a shawl. It takes a special poet to reach such different tonal places, often in the same poem. Who knew that the past could be so exciting? Here it all is, with all its life and wonder and joys and tragedies - open these pages and step on in”
- Jonathan Edwards
“Judith Wozniak’s Making Dolmades in Essex brims with moving recollection. Poems act as perfectly captured moments, coming from photographs, stored memories or the curious eyes of a child watching the adult world unfold before them. Beautifully gathered, a woman shares the encounters that have shaped her and the result is warm, insightful, lasting.”
- Rebecca Goss
Case Notes
If you would like a signed copy of the Case Notes pamphlet, please contact me below and I will provide you with payment details.
£9.99 including postage and packing (uk)
Proceeds to be sent to Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders
“Through a series of distilled and precisely observed portraits of patients in crisis, the poet offers us a glimpse into the day-to-day physical and emotional challenges facing a family doctor. The vanishing world of the old-style GP who knows her patients and journeys alongside them, often in their last moments, is intimately described, profoundly empathic and at times unbearably moving.”
- Jacqueline Saphra
“The poetry of medicine is in all places, all people – New York to Edinburgh, Sarah Bernhardt to the old woman afraid to upset her doctor by showing her tumour. To feel andfind that poetry takes the sensitivity and experience that Judith Wozniak possesses in abundance. To translate it to the page requires a calm discipline that will find the words to enact the eye’s observation and the heart’s compassion. Case Notes reveals on every page that Judith Wozniak is a poet fully and compellingly equal to the task.”
- Michael Hulse
“A worthy winner of the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine in 2020, Judith Wozniak gives us another intriguing insight into the working life of a General Practitioner. Her second pamphlet paints a wide canvas of encounters with patients. To this heady mix she adds the imagined voices of other doctors in different times. With keen observation and precise images, we understand the helplessness of young doctors faced with unexpected tragedy. A number of poems about house calls give us sensitive insights into the bond between doctor and patient. Wozniak explores the vulnerabilities of both with a memorable honesty and humanity.”
- Denise Bundred
These poems look at the life of a GP from a doctor’s point of view. They include a sequence of poems seen through the lens of the doctor described in John Berger’s book ‘A Fortunate Man’ and from the author’s own experiences from medical student to family doctor.
Patient Watching
“Judith Wozniak’s many years of empathetic observation as a GP provide the lens through which she views John Berger’s seminal work describing the life of a country doctor. Add to that her considerable skill as a poet in shaping this moving narrative into a formal sonnet sequence – creating a heroic crown for a heroic man. Elsewhere in this debut pamphlet, she relates her own experiences in medical practice in poems that are vital and compassionate, but never sentimental. The power of her work is to show us ourselves at our most vulnerable, but to find in those moments something redemptive and hopeful. ”
– Tamar Yoseloff
“Judith Wozniak skilfully portrays the working life of a doctor, and how that life operates outside the hospital and its consulting rooms. In these poems we are taken deep within the community and inside patients’ homes. What the doctor witnesses can be harrowing. A woman tries to escape domestic violence; a vulnerable child navigates a day in school ‘clinging to loose scuffed shoes with your toes’; family members are pushed to their limits caring for relatives, but there is life-affirming stuff here too. True bonds are formed between doctor and patient, as ‘secrets and fears’ are disclosed. The doctor may watch ‘from the edge of things’ but will, without question, put the patient first and continue to ‘think of them in the quiet of the night.’ ”
– Rebecca Goss