Editor’s note by Max Wallis
Odontoameloblastoma begins with a name too large for the body it belongs to, a long, Latin mouthful pinned to a lump on a sheep’s jaw. What follows isn’t just a clinical story or a pastoral anecdote, but something deeper: a reckoning with difference, survival, and tenderness.
The sheep becomes more than a patient. It eats, plays, lives with the same joy and instinct as the rest of the flock, even as it carries what marks it out. Slaney writes this without pity. There’s no sentimentality here, just a careful attention to how life goes on anyway… through discomfort, through rupture, through blood and pus and incomplete anaesthetic.
But it’s the closing lines that land hardest: My lump has a shorter name, my courage very small. Slaney turns the focus inward, naming their own frailty in the face of what the sheep endures without question. It’s a quiet undoing. There’s no high drama, only a moment of recognition. That’s what makes the poem so powerful. It asks what strength really looks like, and what we learn from the ones who can’t speak but go on living all the same.
Di Slaney lives in Nottinghamshire where she runs livestock sanctuary Manor Farm Charitable Trust and independent publisher Candlestick Press. She was the winner of The Plough Poetry Prize 2022. Her poems have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and widely published; her collections are available from Valley Press.
