Blood Lines

Juliet Robertson received an unexpected blood cancer diagnosis at the end of 2020 which altered her life trajectory. Juliet began writing poetry in 2021 as a way of making sense of her illness, treatment and prognosis. She discovered that sharing her poetry was a gateway to necessary, but not easy, conversations with family and friends.Prior to this Juliet was an education consultant specialising in outdoor learning and play and the author of two popular books, Dirty Teaching and Messy Maths. In 2024 she was awarded an honorary Doctorate in Education from Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh in recognition of her pioneering work and significant contribution to education.

Blood Lines, despite the overarching and painful subject matter (the poet's terminal diagnosis of acute myeloid leukaemia), is a beautiful book. A poetry collection wrapped in bright photography and captioned with journal notes, Juliet Robertson has created something complete and powerful-a document, a testament, a whole world contained inside its pages. The poems are accessible and playful (the traffic signs of 'C Road Journey'); specific and harrowing ('The walk of a sentenced woman'); yet universal and soulful ('To pull clouds over the moon'). She allows the reader to experience devastating empathy without ever losing her way into cliches of self-pity. Everyone's experience of cancer is different, of course, but as a former leukaemia patient myself, the black comedy of Robertson's laughing hyenas and medical vampires, the threat of relapse and the very real sensation of 'Scanxiety' resonate hard and true to my illness too. Juliet's writing is steeped in love, driven by a pursuit of understanding, and offers catharsis and acceptance. This collection is exactly what it needs to be: heartfelt, fragile and honest.Jamie Woods