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).
While many of the essays in the collection do involve a degree of the sociological approach that has characterised literary gerontology up until this point, the theorisation of the formal aspects of poetry and how this manifests in varying contexts of ageing remains central. This is the collection’s greatest strength—it does not present the ageing individual or the ageing poetic voice as an object of study. Instead, it positions the unique intricacies of the experience of ageing as a lens that may present new ways of thinking about the formal aspects of poetry as a genre, making this a text that has value far beyond what it presents to the growth of literary gerontology. * Journal of Literary Studies *