How We Are
by and published in Edition One of Pomegranate
That incessant question: “So, what do you write about?” Glancing at some themed poetry anthologies suggests there are a few topics that keep coming up. The collections of love poems (there are dozens of those) show that all of us from Catullus to cummings to Kate Clanchy have been head-over-heels at one point. The anthologies of war poetry betray our recurring habit of killing each other. Dirty limerick books – well, sometimes we have one-track minds. Poetry, when it comes down to it, is about people, about us, about our powers and weaknesses, our vulnerabilities and how we respond to them. In the midst of this, a book of poems on the human body – its intricate details, its anomalies, the ways it works, the ways it doesn’t work, and what we do when it doesn’t work – seems wholly natural. “What’s writing really about?” said Ted Hughes. “It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.” The poems in Signs And Humours: The Poetry Of Medicine (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, £8.50) explore being human in a new and startling way. They are rooted firmly in reality.
The book began life in 2005, when its editor Lavinia Greenlaw, herself descended from a family of doctors, approached some of Britain’s leading poets with an unusual commission. She asked them to choose a medical condition that they found interesting; she arranged for them to have interviews with leading doctors and specialists about their chosen topic; and she asked them to write a poem about it. Twenty-two of these poems, along with seventy-eight others selected from several millenniums’ and several continents’ worth of poems concerning the body, make up this book, published earlier this year.
And so like all good anthologies, there is variety. Greenlaw has chosen poems on blindness, autism, Alzheimer’s, anorexia, tinnitus, insomnia. The first poem’s first line (‘Dream Song 207’ by John Berryman) begins the collection with a question (and a lie):
“ – How are you? – Fine, fine.”
It’s a question that permeates the book, as each poem tries to make sense of how its speaker really is. Grey Gowrie is recovering from a heart transplant. Horace has eaten too much garlic. Raymond Carver and Sharon Olds capture that cold, quiet moment of receiving bad news from the doctor. Frank O’Hara paces anxiously. Po Chü-I, c. AD 842, writes briefly and pragmatically about his own paralysis: “Dear friends, there is no cause for so much sympathy…” Robert Burns has toothache.
Perhaps inevitably given the subject matter, the atmosphere is intense – we are taken to the limits of human vulnerability again and again. Illness and injury lock a person inside his or her own tiny universe. Julia Darling, in ‘Chemotherapy’, describes being
“the invalid of these rooms,
stirring soups, awake in the half dark,
not answering the phone when it rings.
I never thought that life could get this small…”
Life is small in Catriona O’Reilly’s sestina ‘Thin’, too, the vicious cycle of anorexia brought out dizzyingly with the repeated end-words: “room”, “skin”, “glass”, “bone”. Throughout the book there’s a sense of people being forced out of their usual worlds while at the same time trapped in them. It’s a strange and terrifying kind of limbo – “I have lain alien in my self so long”, as James Wright puts it.
And yet the tone of the book is far from morose. These poems often touch on fear, isolation and helplessness – but what most of them also have is vibrancy. In the notes at the back of the book where the commissioned poets explain how they wrote their poem, Jo Shapcott says that ‘Composition’ is a poem of “irrelevant thoughts”, unfiltered, to describe a lack of latent inhibition:
“And I sat among the dust motes, my pencil
(blue) sounding loud on the page, and
a blast of sun hit a puddle […]
and my hair was damp on my neck
and I prayed to be disturbed
and hurricanoes whirled and hissed…”
It’s a staggering outpouring of all the mad clutter that makes up the human brain. Elsewhere, Richard Price mixes medical terminology for insomnia with the broken phrases and syncopated rhythms that tend to come to us in those hellish early hours; Ruth Padel enters the world of the mosquito to write about malaria; and Jackie Kay, in ‘My Face is a Map’, speaks as a child fiercely proud of her facial disfigurement:
“I was born with a map of Australia on my face […]
When people gaped and gawped and gawked
I thought they were trying to find Alice Springs,
To work out where they wanted to go, where they’d been. […]
…my map was stitched to my mouth:
every time I managed a whole sentence,
I imagined a small boat floating out of Sydney harbour…”
Of course there’s no such thing as an anthology that pleases everyone – I personally could have done without Mary Carey’s overlong ‘Upon the sight of my abortive birth the 31st December 1657’, and would have liked to have seen an extract from Carole Satyamurti’s brilliant cancer ward sequence, Changing the Subject, or indeed something from Greenlaw herself.
It’s also possible that not everyone will really want to read so many poems about illness, thinking the idea morbid. But dismissing the idea on those terms is missing the point. As Greenlaw writes in the introduction, “good poetry will be written in spite of illness, not because of it”. This is a book of survival. And it shows a huge range of poets – Lucretius, Chaucer, Simon Armitage, Sylvia Plath, Maura Dooley, W.N. Herbert, Charles Simic, John Armstrong, Paul Muldoon, Daljit Nagra, Selima Hill, Philip Larkin, Stephen Knight, Thomas Hardy and John Betjeman to name a few – trying, through language, to understand the human body, to understand what it is to stay alive. What do we write about? Us. Ourselves. How we are. This is a book that takes its readers to the very brink of that, and afterwards, as Emily Dickinson writes:
“My loss, by sickness – Was it loss?
Or that Ethereal Gain
One earns by measuring the Grave –
Then – measuring the Sun –“
Annie Katchinska
Annie Katchinska was born in Moscow and bred in London. She won second prize in Christopher Tower 2007 and recently featured (after being invited via Facebook stalking) in the New Blood slot at the Poetry Cafe. She was recently published in the Bloodaxe anthology Voice Recognition, a collection of work by 21st century writers under 30 yet to publish a first collection. Her favourite things include Latin, Anna Akhmatova and borscht (beetroot soup…I think. Ed.), and she’s currently studying Classics at Pembroke College, Cambridge. She is also God.