Tributary

Poetry was part of Rae Varcoe’s everyday life since Mrs Entwisle led her to Wilfred Owen, R.A.K. Mason and Gerard Manley Hopkins in the third form at school. Like other doctor poets, she was particularly interested in exploring the deep and complex relationships between medicine and poetry.

Rae Varcoe (1944–2025) grew up in Dunedin, and worked as a blood diseases physician at Auckland City Hospital.

Praise for Tributary
‘At the top of her form, as she is in “The Cancer Cells Sum Up”, “Your Diagnosis is Leukaemia”, “Hand-Made House” and “Borderline”, Varcoe is top-notch. … In particular, “Plot 608, The Old Balclutha Cemetery” (where her parents are buried) is a miniature masterpiece, with the tension between the scientist/physician and the grieving daughter held in perfect balance and every word really pulling its weight: 

exons to earth
introns to dust
who will read you now
my brave wee mother
and who will decode
your silence, Dad.

I rank it among the finest poems written in this country in the past 10 years.’
—Iain Sharp, Lumière Reader