Hatchery

Contemplating new life with Elizabeth Osmond

Elizabeth Osmond is a neonatal consultant and a poet who has twice won prizes in the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine. Her work has been published in The Aftershock Review, The Alchemy Spoon, Dust Poetry, Atrium, Ink, Sweat and Tears and The Craft of Care Anthology (Black Pear 2026).

Beth kindly sent me a review copy of Hatchery, but it had already been on my radar since she launched it. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing her read at several online open mics, and already knew her to be a poet of great skill and sensitivity. As a medic, she has access to a rich vein of language that in other hands may be overly dry or technical, but Beth is able to draw the poetic out of it. She has a keen eye for the curios and the artefacts of medical history, turning them over for us in her poems so we can see them in all their strangeness. However, these aren’t simply presented for curiosity’s sake, but to highlight the imaginative leaps that have been necessary to even slightly increase the survival rates of very premature babies. Here is the Kinderbrutanstalt, the child hatchery, with its jars of feathers, its early incubators, and Ward Rounds with Queen Victoria.

This is one of my favourite poems in the collection, bringing Queen Victoria onto a modern day neonatal unit, her own experiences as a mother in contrast with those of today, yet connected through some ghostly residue of feeling that must transcend eras and technologies;

“ … She delivered Leopold after the blessed chloroform / enclosed in his nursery / playmates forbidden / lest he fall and bruise”

Present in all these poems is a prevailing sense of the dignity and humanity with which Beth treats her subjects. She handles field observations with real care and feeling. Although poetry frequently moves me, it rarely makes me physically well up in the way some of these poems do. When she writes “Here you are, my impatient little friend” in I wish I could write you a prescription for time, I find in this moment such care and tenderness, and it is the perfect pivot to end a poem about trying to negotiate more time for a baby who is already on the way. You get the impression that these conversations are ones Beth the consultant and her colleagues are always having, as they move about the ward, perhaps as much to reassure themselves as the tiny lives in their care. In Conversation, her “heart is wanting to be fearless / but it is a colander with little holes / through which doubt seeps in”. To feel this very human doubt and vulnerability and daily find a way to move past this is a special thing.

Another seam running through the work is a passionate defence of the NHS. In I marry the NHS, a fantastical procession of animals participates in this pledge of fidelity to an institution and, perhaps, a state of mind. In Ode to a towel, the humble NHS towel is said to have “the perfect roughness / to stimulate first breath”. Doctors in Difficulty, an after to a poem by Helen Mort, presents the most overtly political tone, in an excoriating take-down of the double standards of expecting doctors to perform miracles but never to require miracle-making in their own lives.

I really enjoyed spending time with this pamphlet, both for its craft and its exquisite storytelling. Hatchery is out now with V Press.