The first guide to cover aspects of voice loss from an occupational health perspective, this reference covers procedures to detect, assess, and prevent voice loss in schools, industrial facilities, and other workplace environments, as well as covers occupational groups at risk and risk factors for developing voice loss-analyzing various chemical, environmental, psychological, and medical causes of this potentially work-related condition.

"Managing Obesity in the Workplace" comprehensively examines how obesity impacts business and provides examples of action that can be taken by employers to prevent weight gain and facilitate weight loss in their staff. A considered, evidence-based analysis of the extent of the obesity problem reveals how this public health epidemic affects all workplaces influencing fitness to work, sickness absence, discrimination and bullying.Case studies from around the world clearly illustrate the extent of the problem and offer practical, innovative and budget friendly solutions for all businesses, large and small. With a focus on nutrition, physical activity, motivation and education, this book is ideal for occupational health professionals, public health and primary care doctors and nurses, health and safety officers, and nutritionists and dieticians. Organisations promoting workplace health, including sports/exercise equipment suppliers, will find it enlightening reading, as will business owners and managers.

Nerys Williams’ new collection questions what makes a  Republic? Machinations of power? The speeches of politicians? The broad sweep of official histories? This sequence of 80 prose-poems, each constructed in 20 sentences, has arisen from the author’s need to tell a more intimate history, to commit an untold oral history to paper. Williams returns to the meaning of “republic” in its Latin origins which meant “wealth of the people”.    The poems tell the story of  a young Welsh woman growing up and coming of age in the 1980s and 90s, a time that culminated with new devolutionary powers in Wales. The explosion of the arts and culture looms large, through bands from New Order to my bloody valentine, but it is explored specifically through Cŵl Cymru’, and the power of Welsh-language bands like Datblygu. This story is also about class, as we explore a family history of hard work in jobs from retail to caregiving. The poems introduce us to family influences, from a father who urges the narrator as a child to ‘own the stage’ in an early school Eisteddfod, to a grandmother who worked long hours in her rural shop, and a mother who was the local midwife.   There are stories told, overheard, handed down, sometimes translated from Welsh. Together, they create an expansive portrait of the era, including the challenges for women, Welsh-speakers, and other marginalized groups. Ferocious remarks about the Welsh in the popular media are dissected with satirical humour and appalled fascination, while other poems describe being a token woman and political outsider on a TV current affairs show panel, tolerated but ostracized.   From her more recent home, the republic of Ireland, Williams poses the possibilities of a nation looking at itself and its history from afar. Wales has not been allowed to be a republic, but is subject to a state that has military claims on its landscape and a second home explosion which has a severe impact on its communities. There is rebellion to be found in the older meaning of “republic”: since the wealth of the people is a wealth of sounded stories, culture, art, and history.

This book considers the development of the lyric form in recent American poetry of the past three decades. By concentrating on the writing of three poets associated with language writing, Charles Bernstein, Michael Palmer and Lyn Hejinian, the discussion considers the attempts of contemporary poetry to problematise the identification of the lyric as a static model of subjectivity. Central considerations motivating the discussion are: How do contemporary lyric poets negotiate the propositions posed by postmodern thought? What reading of lyricism can one formulate once the self is displaced from centre stage and an 'experience' of language takes its place? The book proposes that an aesthetic of error enables us to approach the reconfiguration of the lyric in recent innovative poetry. Drawing from elements of modernist poetic practice, psychoanalytic theory, language philosophy and critical theory this book pursues methods for understanding the demands placed upon the reader of contemporary poetry.

Nerys Williams deftly employs modernist techniques in her innovative new collection of poems, Sound Archives. The reader is enticed by hints and clues, by tone and rhythm, by fragment and exclamation through themes that run from a painting by Gwen John, to 'Conversations with Cocteau', from 'Methane Sonata' to 'Global Warriors'. Often a poem will evolve as a description of a landscape or setting such as Caldy Island, or 'Cater's Starstruck Diner, L.A.' or even as an argument as in 'The Pedagogical poet'. With her philosophical and critical cast of mind these poems are as much about perceptions and values as they are about their subjects, they build sounds-scapes of imagery, veering away from straight-forward narrative. They, as one poem says, 'murder the discursive', in order to eschew cliche. She also uses humour and satire to subvert our expectations of say, a piece ostensibly about heartbreak. She often uses the imperative to challenge our compliance as in 'How to MakeThings Disappear'. Williams confronts our preconceptions about what it might mean to be a woman writing against the background of two formidable traditions: that of Welsh-speaking Wales and of English literature. A thoughtful, subtle and fascinating first collection.

Self-help organizations have an increasingly important role in helping patients, so that doctors can concentrate on those who need their medical skills. This guide details the service provided by each self-help organization, and is designed so that local information can be added by the user. It is a valuable source of reference to GPs, practice managers, practice and community nurses, community health councils and health service managers.