Iain Bamforth is an internationally distinguished figure in the field of the medical humanities. He has worked as a GP in Europe, held positions as a hospital doctor at the American Hospital of Paris, and in the Australian outback, and worked with the World Health Organization, including spells on community health projects in south-east Asia. His publications include The body in the library: a literary history of modern medicine, a book of essays, The good European: essays and arguments, and many articles in journals ranging from the BJGP to The Times Literary Supplement.
Born in Glasgow in 1959, Iain Bamforth has published five collections of poetry: The Modern Copernicus (1984), Sons and Pioneers (1992), Open Workings (1996), A Place in the World (2005), and, most recently The Crossing Fee (2013), from which the poems published here are taken. His sometimes demanding poetry is characterised by a rigorous intellectualism wedded to an international vision. It shows a sharp ear and eye for local details, from the ‘piped-in petrochemicals of the polar night’ in Shetland to a ‘mudflow saga’ in Indonesia, and the poems often draw on an undertow of religious sensibility, insistent even when he writes of the potato: ‘pabulum of the Christian faith’.
Bamforth is also a skilled translator, both of prose and poetry. His version of Hendrik Marsman’s Memories of Holland with its Scottish-accented ‘iridescent smirr’ has an immediately attractive lyricism, though it concludes with a Bamforthian note of cherished menace.