'We lift your life into this room…'

"How much does the book cost?"

"£10."

"Isn't that a lot for a poetry book – not that I read that much poetry."

"I think this book might change your mind."

"Why's that?"

"Well, you work in the mental health field and this book is written by a clinical psychologist"

"and?"

"So you might find it relevant. The book consists of poems reflecting on the therapeutic hour of 50 minutes. The poems cover the content of sessions, the therapist's view of what happens, the client's perspective as well as its impact on the therapist's home life – "Home, and I am a frosty companion."

"Are you trying to tell me something?"

"No, just listen to some examples. For instance, he has a lovely turn of phrase to describe the session – 'rock strewn, barnacled, feel-your-way beach', and

'We lift your life into this room

Like some enormous sculpture.'

"He writes about the therapist's curse, where you become what you are always."

"Haven't I always said something like that."

"Yes, but he expresses it so much better."

'to walk down the street and hear a thousand

Traumas humming in the bodies of passers-by'

"There's a poem The Man that touches on gender issues, very topical these days…"

'I let them in, these men, we let them in

And they are ordinary and terrifying.'"

"Ok – I'll buy a copy, or perhaps two. If the poetry is good as you say, Sally might enjoy it as well, as she's always been interested in literature."

- Reviewed by Ron Wiener, author of The Barefoot Therapist writing as Brian Shepherd

'The Sessions' is written by clinical psychologist Jonathan Totman, who currently lives and works in various NHS, university and charity-sector mental health services in Oxfordshire.

His book is a sequence of fifty poems – representing the '50-minute hour' of a traditional psychotherapy session – which explore talking therapy from the perspective of client and therapist. Drawing on the author's work as a psychologist, as well as his own experiences of being in therapy, the collection pays tribute to the healing power of conversation, whilst also interrogating the complications and contradictions of the process: what does it mean when compassion and care are boxed into a strictly time-limited consultation? What happens within and between us when the personal, professional and political collide? 

Find out more here.

Here are two examples, with thanks to the publishers, Pindrop Press.

Necessary and Sufficient
     for Carl Rogers

Sometimes I imagine you poring over the music

of a session, winding the tape back over and over 

to catch the cadence of a question, the frills and tricks

and repetitions – here a dream, another

guess at something not quite said but sensed,

like summer thunder – heaviness in the air

and the small crescendo of a voice allowed to quench

its thirst. Was that it, just there,

the golden moment, the crucial change of key?

Or no, perhaps a whiff of elegant pretence,

the journey too smooth, the melody too sweet. 

It's not enough to get it right. At the end

of the hour, what's left? What's left at the end of the song? 

We're still busy searching. Something though, no?

The Journey     
after Mary Oliver

But say you've made it, you've finally arrived,

the storm at your back and its wreckage like a dream:

this was just the start. You know that. I

have to remind myself. In the grand scheme

of things, I am just a stopping-off point –

a roadside inn, if you like: warm fire, strong locks,

a hard-won rest almost certainly spoiled,

sooner or later, by some un-asked-for knock

at the door. You'll journey on, circle back,

look up and with horror, think you've gone

nowhere at all, whispering your own bad

advice to yourself and out, once more, in the cold.

You know all this. The start was never the start.

Here we go again. I'm ready when you are.