#TheWritingLife is a hash tag sometimes used by writers on social media to vent their frustrations with lines of poetry, chapter openings and recalcitrant characters that refuse to fit in. But what about when that writing life means each and every line you compose requires someone else to take down dictation and read back your work, and that the same painstaking process must be repeated during every re-edit?
Wendy Stern who died in 2015 had ME or Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, sometimes known as Chronic Fatigue or Post-Viral syndrome, where sufferers experience severe, persistent fatigue and chronic pain. Wendy’s death was not a direct result of her ME but was in the context of it and during the last years of her life when she was bedridden, she turned to poetry as ‘a way of giving expression to her thoughts and feelings’. Her poetry was heavily influence by the Buddhism she followed and the title of her collection is Kshanti which means patient endurance.
Jennifer Sowah* who reviews the collection for us below calls it ‘translucent’
The first time I opened this book I could not stop reading until I had read every poem. Awareness of the poet’s suffering and death made her simple hypnotic style all the more poignant.
A second reading made me look beneath the surface. Below the physical pain I sensed two conflicting emotions: hope that she might achieve wisdom and peace in this life: ‘ … slowly, slowly/ You come to guide me,’ and desolation, in ‘To all that is left’ she asks, ‘Can it really make up /For all the life unlived?’ Both hope and desolation are tinged with suffering. When guidance comes, ‘always it hurts.’ The litany of aspects of ‘the life unlived’ is very powerful as it makes us aware of the simple joys which made Wendy’s life worthwhile and her tragic sense of loss as she faces the prospect that she must ‘leave it all behind.’
Of Wendy’s poem ‘Target’, Jennifer notes It is one of the strangest qualities of Wendy’s poetry that although the poem concludes wondering if she is ‘Just a particularly …/ Easy target?’ there is a greater sense of resignation than of bitterness.
Target
Is your aim particularly good
As you shoot your arrows into the wild night storm
So that they end up landing time and again,
Perfectly placed at my front door?
Or is it that the wind swirls and swoops
And reroutes them through that blackened void
So that they end up landing,
Perfectly positioned, perfectly poised, at my front door?
Or is it that I, naked of flesh,
Naked of bone,
Naked alone,
Am just a particularly,
Just a particularly,
Just a particularly…
Easy target?
Kshanti is published by Poetry Space and available here. You can find out more information about Myalgic Encephalomyelitis at www.actionforme.org.uk
*Jenny Sowah was a teacher of English until her retirement. She has spent part of her life in Africa and is well versed in the literature of many cultures. She now lives with her family in Bristol.