Martin Figura creates poetic record of life during pandemic at Salisbury hospital

Figura worked with staff to produce poems reflecting their experiences during the Covid crisis

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One poem imagines an NHS nightshift worker at the height of the coronavirus crisis as an astronaut, adrift and untethered from a spacecraft. Another touches on the difficulty of trying to console a patient when the comfort of a smile is obscured by a mask.

The feelings of horror, sadness, isolation and frustration that NHS staff and volunteers endured at the height of the pandemic have been crystallised in verse as part of a spoken word collection at Salisbury district hospital.