{"id":4583,"date":"2013-05-27T10:26:32","date_gmt":"2013-05-27T10:26:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=4583"},"modified":"2020-12-09T14:36:18","modified_gmt":"2020-12-09T14:36:18","slug":"ken-head-reviews-riddance-by-anthony-wilson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/ken-head-reviews-riddance-by-anthony-wilson\/","title":{"rendered":"Ken Head reviews ‘Riddance’ by Anthony Wilson"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In a typical year, I read a lot of new poetry, not all of it, including some of my own, overwhelmingly interesting.\u00a0 Now and again, though, a review copy arrives which sets the pulses racing\u00a0 and, for me, Riddance<\/em>, Anthony Wilson\u2019s third collection from Worple Press, is one such, memorable poems in a volume I couldn\u2019t put down and have already re-read several times.\u00a0 His subject is his response to cancer, more particularly, to the diagnosis of non-Hodgkin\u2019s lymphoma which he received on Valentine\u2019s 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 \u201cexplain what happens when an individual is diagnosed with cancer\u201d because there are \u201cany number of books\u201d which in both scientific and personal terms do that, but to find ways of \u201cdescribing the truth for the individiual who is experiencing it\u201d, a truth \u201coften found in more unexpected places:\u00a0 a nurse\u2019s joke as she begins to inject you;\u00a0 a tin of brownies left on the doorstep by a friend;\u00a0 the offer of a lift by a neighbour\u201d.<\/p>\n

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<\/em>, having been previously published as a separate volume by the Exeter Leukaemia Fund.\u00a0 Part Two, All Lives, All Dances, All is Loud<\/em>, 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\u2019s own illness went into remission and who died on All Hallows\u2019 Eve, 2008.\u00a0 Of the remaining sections, Part Three, Riddance<\/em>, contains twenty-eight poems, Part Four, Three Lifetimes, <\/em>twenty-two poems, written during what Wilson sees now as the beginning of a return of \u201cnormal life\u201d and Part Five, Reasons for Life<\/em>, eighteen poems begun in note form before his illness but included in this collection because, as he says, \u201cthey are an attempt to recover and celebrate all that seems most essential and affirming about the act of living\u201d.<\/p>\n

Affirming \u201cthe act of living\u201d under these circumstances isn\u2019t, 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.\u00a0 Being rational, staying positive, are difficult at the best of times, let alone when, \u201con 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.\u201d\u00a0 Nevertheless, it\u2019s the task, as Wilson makes clear in How to Pray for the Dying<\/em>,\u00a0 to which Riddance<\/em> is dedicated:\u00a0 \u201cDo not say: \u2018Lord, this is not of you,\u2019 \/ rebuking our tumours \/ as though we were not in the room with them. \/ Say instead \u2018We are afraid\u2019 \/ and \u2018We do not understand.\u2019 … Pray for the obvious. \/ Pray we live to see Christmas … Don\u2019t you dare \/ say \u2018It\u2019s not fair.\u2019 \/ Spare me your weeping. \/ Try saying \u2018Shit happens.\u2019\u201d\u00a0 No sentiment, no self-pity, although, as in Chemotherapy<\/em>,\u00a0 they\u2019re sometimes hard to avoid:\u00a0 \u201cOn bad days you long to be dead. \/ On good days you think you are.\u201d<\/p>\n

For most, though perhaps not all, cancer patients, there are times following initial diagnosis (\u201cIt\u2019s probably nothing \/ most likely benign. \/ It isn\u2019t, it\u2019s cancer. \/ There isn\u2019t much time.\u201d) and during treatment when personal survival hangs in the balance and when, with the best will in the world, the doctors can\u2019t be sure of the eventual outcome either.\u00a0 Those days of waiting for test results, biopsies, three or six-month check-ups to see if there\u2019s 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.\u00a0 It\u2019s 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.\u00a0 A number of the untitled poems in Three Lifetimes<\/em> make this point well:\u00a0 \u201cI 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.\u201d And, by contrast:\u00a0 \u201cSome things are too close to mention – \/ X\u2019s weight loss, the sudden death of Y. \/ And yet, today was special: \/ serviceable hot choc at the station \/ and there, a display of children\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Space permitting, I\u2019d like to write at greater length about All Lives, All Dances, All is Loud<\/em>, Wilson\u2019s long poem (one hundred and ten deceptively loosely constructed couplets) in memory of his friend Lucy Mason.\u00a0 It\u2019s a fine and movingly meditative poem which makes, I think, many of the points I\u2019ve made above, albeit for a different purpose.\u00a0 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 (\u201cYou do not need me to tell you \/ one beholding other is all we require \/ for communion to take place\u201d) and his conviction that despite its being hindsight that \u201caffords us these luxuries \/ of looking back and inventing \/ new-minted previous selves\u201d, 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\u2019s concluding lines:<\/p>\n

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\u201clike those distant cathedral bells \/ tolling three seconds \/ behind the time we live by \/<\/p>\n

and insisting:\u00a0 That small handful \/ of life, how did you use it?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a92013:\u00a0 Ken Head <\/strong><\/p>\n

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Buy your copy of\u00a0 Riddance<\/em> published by Worple Press here<\/a><\/p>\n

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                                  In a typical year, I read a lot of new poetry, not all of it, including some of my own, overwhelmingly interesting.\u00a0 Now and again, though, a review copy arrives which sets the pulses racing\u00a0 and, for me, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4583"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4583\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23723,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4583\/revisions\/23723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}