Seven years ago I published The Year of Drinking Water, a pamphlet of poems, about my experience of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (Exeter Leukaemia Fund, 2007).
These were the first poems I wrote about my cancer, mostly in a rush, after my treatment had finished in September 2006.
I published the pamphlet under the aegis of Exeter Leukaemia Fund, who fund the haematology unit where I was treated, to help raise funds for their vital and ground-breaking work. I felt it was the least I could do.
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We rearranged the furniture, ordered some wine, and held the launch in the very waiting room I had sat in only months before.
The pamphlet takes its name from my doctors’ instructions to drink three litres of water a day, which they said would help flush the chemotherapy poisons from my system.
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When I began writing the poems I did not know how long the eventual, book-length sequence they would go on to appear was to be. All I could be certain of was that I now felt poetry returning to me, something I had much cause to doubt during my chemo and radiotherapy treatments.
In no small part this was due to being able to concentrate on reading once again, specifically the marvellous poetry of the late Julia Darling, collected in Sudden Collapses in Public Places and Apology for Absence, and The Poetry Cure, the anthology she edited with Cynthia Fuller. I owe a huge debt of thanks to Babs Short for introducing me to her work.
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The Year of Drinking Water is now out of print. It later became a full-length collection of poems called Riddance (Worple Press, 2012).
For one week you can download the poems of The Year of Drinking Water in the format that they first appeared, for free. If you have been touched by cancer, or know someone who has, do feel free to share the pdf link above with them.
You can learn more about Exeter Leukaemia Fund here.
Anthony Wilson 
dear Ant
poetry saves lives! How true and there are patients in my Mardon group
who would just love a poetry workshop. Are you free to come one Thursday afternoon before August, I could give you tea and cake but you would save lives!
Cant access my google mail please would you reply to cmharvey@talktalk.net. Thanks so much and forgive the presumption.
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Hi Caroline, yes! Am around on Sunday. Let’s chat x
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Love having a copy of the original pamphlet as pdf! Enriches ‘Riddance’ somehow. THANK YOU!
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Hi Nell
So pleased you saw this. I am fond of it too. Poetry did not give up on me after all.
as ever, A x
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Thank you so very much, Riddance is on my to buy list.
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Very generous of you to do this. Great many thanks for Water!
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Anthony, such a gift this Sunday morning. I’ve just read through these wonderful poems and am about to send them off to a dear friend who had lymphoma 20 years ago. I was visiting her and her husband when they got the diagnosis. We all cried and I offered to move to a hotel to give them privacy, but she insisted that I stay. “We need you here.” Over the months of her chemo, my job became baking the oatmeal raisin cookies she loved whenever she called for them. She’s fully recovered, but I know these poems will mean a great deal to her.
Someone once said about jazz, “The music never lets you down.” I agree with that and would say the same about poetry. You’ve proven that here.
All best, Molly
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