In a typical year, I read a lot of new poetry, not all of it, including some of my own, overwhelmingly interesting. Now and again, though, a review copy arrives which sets the pulses racing and, for me, Riddance, Anthony Wilson’s third collection from Worple Press, is one such, memorable poems in a volume I couldn’t put down and have already re-read several times. His subject is his response to cancer, more particularly, to the diagnosis of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma which he received on Valentine’s Day, 2006 at the age of forty-two and the challenge he sets himself, as he makes clear in a very informative introduction, is not simply to “explain what happens when an individual is diagnosed with cancer” because there are “any number of books” which in both scientific and personal terms do that, but to find ways of “describing the truth for the individiual who is experiencing it”, a truth “often found in more unexpected places: a nurse’s joke as she begins to inject you; a tin of brownies left on the doorstep by a friend; the offer of a lift by a neighbour”.
The collection, which is generous and far-reaching in both content and range, is divided into five parts, the twenty-four poems contained in the first, The Year Of Drinking Water, having been previously published as a separate volume by the Exeter Leukaemia Fund. Part Two, All Lives, All Dances, All is Loud, takes the form of a long poem in memory of Lucy Mason, a friend and designer and maker of textile wall-hangings, whose diagnosis of lung cancer occurred a few weeks before Wilson’s own illness went into remission and who died on All Hallows’ Eve, 2008. Of the remaining sections, Part Three, Riddance, contains twenty-eight poems, Part Four, Three Lifetimes, twenty-two poems, written during what Wilson sees now as the beginning of a return of “normal life” and Part Five, Reasons for Life, eighteen poems begun in note form before his illness but included in this collection because, as he says, “they are an attempt to recover and celebrate all that seems most essential and affirming about the act of living”.
Affirming “the act of living” under these circumstances isn’t, as I know from my own experience of cancer treatment and as other readers will know at least as well, the easiest trick in the book to manage. Being rational, staying positive, are difficult at the best of times, let alone when, “on the ward where they filled me / with life-saving chemicals / which made my hair fall out … We discuss the important things, / like the weather, / but never what happens here, / the binging of the drips.” Nevertheless, it’s the task, as Wilson makes clear in How to Pray for the Dying, to which Riddance is dedicated: “Do not say: ‘Lord, this is not of you,’ / rebuking our tumours / as though we were not in the room with them. / Say instead ‘We are afraid’ / and ‘We do not understand.’ … Pray for the obvious. / Pray we live to see Christmas … Don’t you dare / say ‘It’s not fair.’ / Spare me your weeping. / Try saying ‘Shit happens.’” No sentiment, no self-pity, although, as in Chemotherapy, they’re sometimes hard to avoid: “On bad days you long to be dead. / On good days you think you are.”
For most, though perhaps not all, cancer patients, there are times following initial diagnosis (“It’s probably nothing / most likely benign. / It isn’t, it’s cancer. / There isn’t much time.”) and during treatment when personal survival hangs in the balance and when, with the best will in the world, the doctors can’t be sure of the eventual outcome either. Those days of waiting for test results, biopsies, three or six-month check-ups to see if there’s been any re-growth, are like living in limbo, being neither fully in nor out of either the world of the well or that of the ill, occupying a space in which small things take on immense importance. It’s a view Wilson records frequently, sometimes with a degree of gallows humour, sometimes grateful for what a day has held, always with a total absence of sentimentality or self-pity. A number of the untitled poems in Three Lifetimes make this point well: “I have been standing on estuary sands. / The sky comes to gossip and stretch. / A bus of white heads and coats. / A blue tractor taller than me.” And, by contrast: “Some things are too close to mention – / X’s weight loss, the sudden death of Y. / And yet, today was special: / serviceable hot choc at the station / and there, a display of children’s art. / A poet had taken them to the coast. / The beaks of the birds they saw blazed orange, / a collage of their chopped up tickets.”
Space permitting, I’d like to write at greater length about All Lives, All Dances, All is Loud, Wilson’s long poem (one hundred and ten deceptively loosely constructed couplets) in memory of his friend Lucy Mason. It’s a fine and movingly meditative poem which makes, I think, many of the points I’ve made above, albeit for a different purpose. Addressing Lucy directly, Wilson remembers not only his admiration both for the quality of her work and her total commitment to it, but also the pleasure of shared moments in their creative lives (“You do not need me to tell you / one beholding other is all we require / for communion to take place”) and his conviction that despite its being hindsight that “affords us these luxuries / of looking back and inventing / new-minted previous selves”, she was, in her life, a great deal more than the sum of her parts. How posterity may remember her, on the other hand, or indeed, any of us, is a riddle much less important than the question contained in the poem’s concluding lines:
“like those distant cathedral bells / tolling three seconds / behind the time we live by /
and insisting: That small handful / of life, how did you use it?”
©2013: Ken Head
Buy your copy of Riddance published by Worple Press here