Kathryn Bevis is a UK poet who died of cancer earlier in the week. UK poet Jo Bell on The Poetic License describes Bevis:
In the case of Kathryn Bevis, what many people knew about her first - perhaps in the very moment of meeting her - was that she was dying of cancer. We knew this because her poems touched on it as a part of her life: acknowledging it, owning it, refusing to be told how to approach it. Kathryn wrote about cancer with the same compassion and mischief that she brought to her other subjects. She imagined it as a ring-tailed lemur, leaping around the screens of her many scans. It was a creature like herself, sharing the same endangered habitat as herself - for both of us, a forest fire.

In the case of Kathryn Bevis, what many people knew about her first - perhaps in the very moment of meeting her - was that she was dying of cancer. We knew this because her poems touched on it as a part of her life: acknowledging it, owning it, refusing to be told how to approach it. Kathryn wrote about cancer with the same compassion and mischief that she brought to her other subjects. She imagined it as a ring-tailed lemur, leaping around the screens of her many scans. It was a creature like herself, sharing the same endangered habitat as herself - for both of us, a forest fire.
