From The Guardian : Maps of the mind: The Lion's Face How do you write an opera about dementia? Poet Glyn Maxwell on the moving journey that produced The Lion's Face Glyn Maxwell guardian.co.uk Tuesday 25 May 2010 21.46 BST "Three years earlier, I had been asked by the composer Elena Langer to write a libretto for an opera about Alzheimer's. My first thoughts about the disease were mostly wrong. Knowing nothing about the subject, I did what poets do: I tried out some verse-forms – villanelles, pantoums, ghazals. I was falling into the trap of substituting the patterned oddities of poetry for the dire incoherences of dementia, looking for lyricism by default. "The more I learned, the better the poems became. The Institute of Psychiatry in south London's Denmark Hill opened its doors to Elena and me. We talked to scientists and researchers, saw x-rays and brain scans. We met care-givers, psychologists, music and drama therapists. We saw good care homes where we...