Hatchery

“Hatchery is an essential guide on how to wed, celebrate, and advocate for our NHS. Stunning imagery and metaphor stitched throughout in myth, a hard graft medic with historical transitions in care. ‘Take comfort in ritual / step into sacred waters.’ Elizabeth Osmond's poems treat birth to a last breath with all senses, especially touch. She splices medical expertise and tantalising storytelling with human kindness. ‘Doctors in Difficulty’ is raw in its reality of caring whilst juggling family and self. ‘Yeah, this is how it's done’.” Helen Sheppard

“Drawing on her expertise as a neonatal consultant, Elizabeth Osmond applies her impressive sensibilities as a poet to chart a chronological course through the evolution of medical care and prevailing attitudes, skilfully interweaving these fascinating historical dioramas with contemporary testimony borne of experience and observations in the field. Queen Victoria, having ‘chosen to become interested in 2024’, makes ward rounds where ‘She melts through the wall’ and ‘a laced glove strokes the Perspex door’, while modern practitioners undertake the ‘Newborn Check’, ensuring their charges are ‘Creased, as washing bundled fresh from the machine’. A 1903 exhibition of ‘incubator babies’ contrasts with the tender dignity of ‘Conversation’, in which ‘I talk to the baby in the incubator [...] I tell him we all once were stars’. Finding imaginative resonance in references ranging from a zoo’s Reptile House to the BBC Shipping Forecast, these poems are alternately magical and pragmatic, interrogative yet compassionate, brimming with humanity and intelligence. Even if Osmond’s ‘heart is wanting to be fearless / but it is a colander with little holes / through which doubt seeps in’, Hatchery is a work of hope and wonder: ‘I wash my hands’ she writes, ‘and contemplate new life’.” Sarah Doyle

Hatchery is very visceral and very vibrant.

ISBN: 978-1-0682701-2-3
36 pages
R.R.P. £7.50

A sample poem may be enjoyed below.

PRE-ORDER Hatchery NOW using the paypal options below. [Hatchery is out May 2026; pre-orders will be sent out in the week of publication.]

 

Hatchery (with p&p options)

Hatchery (with p&p for UK only delivery) £9.49 GBP Hatchery (with p&p for non-EU Rest of World delivery) £23.50 GBP

 
N.B. We can no longer sell to the EU. Any other international customs/duty charges are the buyer's responsibility. 

Conversation

after ‘My Blue Hen’ by Ann Gray, The Moth Magazine (Issue 20, Spring 2015)

I talk to the baby in the incubator. 
I hold his body contained, 
and tell him the ventilator 
is the ocean 
rushing in and out.

We have a murmured conversation 
in Greek and German:
atelectasis and pendelluft.

I tell him we all once were stars, 
that the forests need our care. 
That my heart is wanting to be fearless 
but it is a colander with little holes
through which doubt seeps in. 
That however much time passes, I still feel new.
I tell him in order to survive in Minecraft,
you must first find wood.

The radiographer slides the hard plate
under his soft back.
He replies with the urgent beep
of the saturations monitor.

I whisper to him that when he grows up, 
he could do anything. He could climb Everest
or sail the Atlantic
or fly to Mars.