1. Casehistory Alison: Head Injury
Objectives:
AO1Respond to texts critically and imaginatively, select and evaluate textual detail to illustrate and support interpretations.
AO2: Explain how language, structure and form contribute to writers’ presentation of ideas, themes and settings.
Casehistory Alison: Head Injury
Starter:
Who do you think would be ‘…my husband’s wife’?
What about ‘…my mother’s only daughter’?
Challenge - Discuss:
The title of the poem is ‘Casehistory: Alison (head injury)’.
What do you think this poem is going to be about?
Why might you talk about yourself in the third person? What is the effect?

2. The Title How effective is the title?
What type of language does it use? Why?
What is the effect of this on the reader?
Why do you think U.A. Fanthorpe uses the name of the woman rather than anonymity given patient confidentiality issues?
How does knowing the patient’s name make the poem more meaningful or effective?

3. First Impressions
 Read the poem.
What do you think has happened to Alison? The opening line above has a play-like feel. Imagine how this scene might look on stage.
How might you describe the attitude of the speaker of the poem?
The first line of the poem is, ‘(She looks at her photograph)’
What is the effect of this line on the reader?

4. Looking deeper ‘A bright girl she was.’
Look at the grammatical structure of this line.
How would a person normally write that line?
Why has Fanthorpe altered the grammatical structure?
What purpose does it serve?
What is the effect of broken stanzas linked by enjambment?
Find a quotation from the poem which shows each of the following emotions:
Grief
Pride
Hope
Confusion

5. What does the younger Alison have that the Alison of the present does not?
Alison of the past
Alison of the present
‘Autocratic knee / Like a Degas dancer’s’
Knees that now ‘lug’ her ‘upstairs / Hardly’

6. Then and now
Look back at your table showing the differences between Alison before her injury and after.
How, and why, does Fanthorpe show in graphic detail the difference between Alison physically then and now and her life then and now?
Look at how the lines 6 and 7 look and what that has to say about Alison then and now.

7. Consolidation
What do you think Fanthorpe is saying about mental health in this poem?
Do you think the reader’s attitude towards Alison as a narrator is affected by her brain damage?