A week in books: A gift for the NHS

Literary anthologies can be heartless, dispiriting affairs that have more in common with cemeteries than celebrations. I once heard the poet Tony Harrison mention that his work had just entered the Oxford Book of Death. "Aren't they all?" muttered the sardonic bard of Leeds.

So it comes as an invigorating shock to find a collection of poetry and prose that proves its point and cheers you up – even though many of the items dwell on sickness and disease. But then The Gift: New Writing for the NHS (edited by David Morley; Stride, £7.95) is hardly your average trawl through the canon in search of forgotten gems. A collaboration between Birmingham Health Authority and Warwick University, this "act of community, even solidarity" with the NHS puts pieces by health workers alongside a remarkable spread of contributions (all given gratis) from leading British writers. They include Doris Lessing, Hanif Kureishi, Andrew Motion, Peter Porter, Fay Weldon, Jonathan Coe, Carol Ann Duffy, Tom Paulin, and a couple of dozen others. More than 30,000 copies of the book will be distributed to the health authority's staff, with a public launch at Warwick University on 15 May (details: www.warwickartscentre.co.uk). The Gift is available post free for £7.95 from Stride Publications at 11 Sylvan Road, Exeter EX4 6EW; proceeds will go towards a trust for Birmingham Health Authority personnel.

By no means all these poems and prose passages belong to the fashionable shroud-waving genre you might label as SickLit. Even when hospital procedures do loom large, it's the universal experience of waiting, hoping and worrying, rather than clinical minutiae, that inspires most work. "They're as close as I come to church," runs one poem by Kathleen Jamie, "these fallow rooms of spider-plants/ and magazines, where the telephone shrills/ for someone else, and the outside world/ is a distant drone, and time itself is out on call." That sense of sickness creating a hiatus in the flow of time informs many great works from clinic or ward: Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain springs to mind. And The Gift confirms that one decisive part of many cures may be the space to think. (Not that you'd know that from ER.) Patients rather than politics preoccupy most of its writers, though I was glad to come across this barbed haiku – "the underfunder's utopia" – by the Glaswegian poet Tom Leonard: "the state hospital/ with one bed/ always full/ always efficient."

Recent polls have shown that an astonishing three-quarters of voters endorse the case for higher taxes to fund the NHS. We treat this enduring affection as part of the British political weather, but it's a historical anomaly. A new edition of Charles Webster's The National Health Service: a Political History (OUP, £12.99) underlines the extreme "unorthodoxy" of Bevan's tax-funded programme.

Yet this British institution with a popular legitimacy far in excess of any other pillar of the state (the monarchy included) has, up to now, drawn precious little from its vast fund of cultural goodwill. Somehow, prime-time Holby City doesn't seem a sufficient creative recompense.

True, visual artists have worked in and for hospitals, and the odd poet will find him- or herself attached for a spell to a surgery. But I can think of no precedent for The Gift in its scope, nor in its direct involvement of NHS workers. It also gives a glimpse of David Morley's projects for the Warwick Writing Programme, which aim to bring together literary and scientific ways of seeing. (A Romany by birth and a research biologist by training, Morley doesn't exactly count as an identikit literary type.) His anthology pays a rich homage to the art of medicine – and makes a compelling case for the medicine of art.