Something Like The Sea: thinking through my father's aphasia

This version of a keynote paper and poetry reading presented to the Poetry and Voice conference at University College Chichester in 2010 explores the background to the composition of the poetry in Deep Field, a book of sequences concerned with the experience of deep aphasia and loss of language in old age. This exploration is both biographical and pedagogic, with attention to the extent to which poetry can be a tool to 'think through' questions of identity and self-expression.