Table of Contents
Award-winning poet Jane Thomas, who grew up in Meols, is publishing her first collection.
Coracle will be released in September — World Alzheimer's Month — drawing on the years she spent caring for her father, Jack, through the illness.
Coracle explores love, loss and memory, and the particular grief of watching a parent change while they are still there.
Written across the years Jane supported her father, it blends personal experience with philosophy and creative health practice to ask what remains of a relationship when language and memory begin to slip.
Jane said: “I realised I was learning my dad all over again — not the man he had been, but the man he was becoming. Poetry was the only place I could hold both versions of him at once.”
“When his words began to fade, mine arrived. The poems became a bridge between us.”
Published to coincide with World Alzheimer's Day on September 21, Jane hopes the collection will resonate with families navigating dementia and open up conversation about care, identity and the emotional labour so often carried by women.
The title poem was nominated by the Poetry Society for the Forward Prize, and Jane's poems have appeared in The Poetry Review, The Rialto and Stand.
Jane has received a Developing Your Creative Practice award from Arts Council England, and in 2025 won a Literature Matters award from the Royal Society of Literature for her work supporting unpaid female carers.
Poet Helen Mort called Coracle “a collection we urgently need, examining the politics of care with nuance and generosity.”
Copies can be purchased at www.livecanon.co.uk/store/product/coracle-jane-thomas.
