Oddgeir Synnes is Professor of Health Humanities at the Centre for Diaconia and Professional Practice, VID Specialized University, Oslo, Norway. Synnes has a master’s degree in Nordic literature and a PhD in illness narratives and works with applying perspectives from the humanities to healthcare, both through practical projects and in research. His key areas of interest include cultural and narrative gerontology, creative writing (e.g., in cancer care, palliative care, and dementia care), literary representations of illness, and narrative inquiry. His most recent book is Ways of Home Making in Care for Later Life (2020), co-edited with Bernike Pasveer and Ingunn Moser.Olga V. Lehmann, PhD, is a researcher, lecturer, and mental health activist. She is an associate professor in Psychology at the University of Stavanger and she has a private clinical practice. Her main areas of interest involve feelings and emotions, silence, communication, humanistic-existential psychology, grief therapeutic writing, grief and bereavement, poetic instants, and qualitative methods. She has published, among others, Poetry and Imagined Worlds (2017) and Deep Experiencing: Dialogues Within the Self (2017).

A Poetic Language of Ageing is a text that evidences unequivocally that literary gerontology as a discipline has come of age…it retains at heart the impulse that has fuelled most of the branches of gerontological research: a recognition that older age be seen as more than a period of decline or deterioration, and an insistence that ageing individuals be given the opportunity to have their value recognised.

• List of ContributorsForeword Gregory OrrAcknowledgementsIntroduction: A Poetic Language of Ageing Olga V. Lehmann and Oddgeir Synnes1. The Mother of Beauty: Notes on the (Possible) Poetry of Dementia Mark Freeman2. Poetry and Dementia: Imagining and Shaping More Just Futures Aagje Swinnen3. Time and Dignity: A Phenomenological Investigation of Poetry Writing in Dementia Care Oddgeir Synnes, Eva Gjengedaland Målfrid Råheim4. Growing Older with Haiku: What Haiku Offers to Japanese Expats in Denmark Kyoko Murakami5. Poetry Lasts Forever: Case Study of a 100-year-old Brazilian Poet and His Daughter Ana Cecilia de Sousa Bastos6. ‘An Old Man Can Do Somewhat’: Styles of Male Old Age in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 2 Arthur W. Frank7. Virtuous Ageing as a Poetic Endeavour: Motivations to Write and Effects of Writing among Older Adults in Norway Olga V. Lehmann andSvend Brinkmann8. The Poetics of Growing Old: Metaphoric Competence and the Philosophic Homework of Later Life William L. Randall9. Poetry, Science, and a Science of Poetry: With an Illustration of Poetry and Ageing Steven R. Brown10. Writing Lives Merete Mazzarella11. Other Voices: George Oppen, Dementia, and the Echo of Lyric Alastair MorrisonIndex