The Poetry of Time: Connection and Communication after Age-Related Cognitive Loss
The Researchers
Professor Liz BarryLink opens in a new window from the Department of English, working with poet and dementia advocate Dr Lesley Saunders and Coventry charity Arts Uplift
The Challenge
The challenge is two-fold: firstly, to help people living with dementia and those who care for them to find ways of communicating and connecting after language is lost, and secondly, to help people manage difficult experiences of time (the loss of an ability to remember the past, but also to predict the future). Impaired communication and disordered experiences of time are both disorienting and can lead to feelings of a loss of selfhood. Liz Barry seeks to support those living with dementia and those who spend time with and care for them to use their existing abilities (gesture, laughter, improvisatory skills) to preserve and enhance communication. She also wants to use the structures, rhythms and images of poetry--often preserved in the memory of those with dementia--to create shared experiences, enhance wellbeing and improve cognition.
Our Approach
Prof Liz Barry and Dr Saunders have written a booklet ('Beyond Words') offering insights for informal carers, family members and care home visitors from Dr Saunders' experience, Prof Barry's research and carers' expertise. It offers guidance on how to communicate when language is lost, drawing on scenes from life and from memoirs, offering insights about time and communication, and providing practical tips and strategies. Prof Barry has also produced a playlist of poems learnt by older people as children, which has been recorded by well-known actors and personalities (Tony Robinson, Jo Brand, Jonathan Pryce, Caroline Quentin and others). This forms the basis of workshops that will be run in care homes exploring the usefulness of shared and remembered rhythms of poetry in helping communication and memory.
Our Impact
Those living with dementia often still have incredible resources at their disposal. They can marshal enduring skills in communicating, using expressive gesture, generating humour and laughter from their situation, and drawing out the pleasure in words in themselves. Liz and Lesley鈥檚 booklet Beyond Words, drawing on Liz鈥檚 research and Lesley鈥檚 expertise offers ideas, guidance and tips for better communication between carers, visitors and those living with dementia. It will help carers understand the experience of dementia, manage their expectations about what communication can be, employ practical strategies to connect and enjoy conversing with loved ones, and see all the things that those living with dementia can do, often with resourcefulness and imagination. The booklet is not yet in widespread distribution but has already made an impact. A carer looking after her partner with dementia said that the booklet has 鈥渏olted me to become a better carer.鈥� A lawyer dealing with will-making and probate for those living with dementia, and a dementia carer, calls the booklet 鈥渨onderful鈥�, giving carers 鈥渧alidation and confidence鈥�. She has shared it with clients and their families living with dementia who she says will find the booklet very valuable. The Head of Social Care for a large county council is considering incorporating it into the dementia work they undertake, and an MP has made sure it is being considered by his party's spokesperson for Care and Carers. The workshops that Liz is running in dementia care homes are set to improve people鈥檚 wellbeing, cognitive abilities and experience of living in time. Poetry can take people back to happier times and restore deeply embedded memories of childhood or youth, and familiar people and places. It can also provide pleasure and satisfaction in the present. Dementia can leave people anxious or uneasy, unable to remember but also not knowing what to expect. Poetry can be thought of as 'organized time', its structures helping those with dementia navigate future time. Creating poetry can also allow for a more spontaneous, open-ended experience of time (rare in care settings), a chance to improvise and play. Liz鈥檚 poetry playlist, and the workshops and care activities based on it, use these valuable properties to therapeutic and creative ends.
