Agimat by Romalyn Ante review – spells to ward off trauma

The poet and nurse’s second collection melds medical imagery with Filipino myth to make sense of Covid, love and loss

The hospital ward is often where the heart sinks – a place steeped in pain and unspeakable grief. However, Romalyn Ante, a Filipino-British practising nurse in the NHS, offers another side to this familiar tale. In her spellbinding meditation on love and loss, hope is less “the thing with feathers” and more the thing with forceps – prescribing metaphors like medicine from a hospital drawer.

The collection starts with the heartbreaking stories of day-to-day life in a British clinic, including the chaos of Covid-19 frontlines. One woman hangs herself from a hospital rail. Later, a teenager jumps from a viaduct and another boy, certain he can never be healed, decides to drink bleach: