Dr Samuel Rogers is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at UWE Bristol. He is a poet-critic whose writing has appeared in English, PERVERSE, Streetcake, Symbiosis, Tears in the Fence, and in the 2021 Yearbook of English Studies which he guest-edited. He is also a co-editor of Modern Language Review. He is finalising a monograph on twentieth-century British poetry. His current project is an empirical study of healthcare, wellbeing and poetry.
This poem marks a return to the lyric voice as a means by which to process emotional experience. As an awe-struck bystander to pregnancy and childbirth, the author offers all that he can: a deepened sense of care, of which the poem forms a part.