Synapse, Must Reads

Literature & Medicine: Must Reads
by Larissa Picard ::: bio

This edition’s review is by Larissa Picard, Program Director for Community Reading and Discussion at the Vermont Humanities Council and a Literature & Medicine facilitator.

Within Without
One of the more arresting images in Donald Hall’s 1998 poetry collection, Without — written in memory of his late wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, who died of leukemia in 1995 at age 48 — shows up during a meditation on Kenyon’s chemotherapy treatments. In “The Ship Pounding,” one of 20 short poems in the collection, Hall recounts that

Each morning I made my way
among gangways, elevators,
and nurses’ pods to Jane’s room
to interrogate the grave helpers
who tended her through the night
while the ship’s massive engines
kept its propellers turning.

The idea of the hospital as a massive ship, with its myriad compartments, round-the-clock crew, and tube-laden passengers, artfully captures the helplessness patients and their loved ones feel in the face of terminal illness and the medical science that seeks to stave it off. But instead of making progress, the ship, according to Hall, is a

vessel that heaves water month
after month, without leaving
port, without moving a knot,
without arrival or destination,
its great engines pounding.

“The Ship Pounding” is a good choice for opening up discussion of Hall’s moving book with Literature & Medicine participants. (For that matter, the poem could stand alone as a reading.) Health care workers may take exception to the metaphor of a moored ship and be inclined to offer substitute images. Or they may empathize with Hall and share their own sense of pounding their engines to little avail. Either way, hospital staff likely will find this poem an accessible, powerful medium through which they can talk about the environment in which they work.

In fact, the entire book is accessible. Without is more a story told in short, poetic segments than it is a collection of independent poems. The short poems, like “The Ship Pounding,” are intermixed with an extended poem cycle titled, “Her Long Illness,” which opens the collection and anchors its first half. “Her Long Illness” is what it says it is — a day-in-day-out narrative of the long months preceding Kenyon’s death. Unlike the short poems, Hall narrates “Her Long Illness” in the third person — a distancing technique that allows the poet to step back from his own participation in Kenyon’s illness and position himself as onlooker. “Daybreak until nightfall, /he sat by his wife at the hospital/He drank coffee and read/The Globe. He paced...” writes Hall. What nurse hasn’t observed family members doing those very things? By stepping away from the situation, Hall aligns himself with those of us who stand outside the suffering. In doing so, he invites the reader to learn what it is like to love someone who is dying by degrees in front of your eyes.

The second half of the book opens with the title poem. “Without” is the only poem in the collection that displays blatant poetic devices. The lines run together and end awkwardly and the linear narrative present in the rest of the book becomes all but unrecognizable. Bleak images of nature stand alongside jarring references to Kenyon’s disease. The effect is total: readers are swept away with Hall in his relentless, unpunctuated grief.

we lived in a small island stone nation
without color under gray clouds and wind
distant the unlimited ocean acute
lymphoblastic leukemia without seagulls

***
hours days weeks months weeks days hours
the year endured without punctuation
february without ice winter sleet
snow melted recovered but nothing

With time, Hall’s raw, palpable grief transforms into a steady, hollow ache. Accordingly, the poems return to their former story-like quality, recording the days, months, and finally, the first full year “without” Kenyon. In the penultimate poem, “Letter After a Year,” Hall still feels like he’s “in hell. Every day/I play in repertory the same/script without you, without love.” But the final poem, “Weeds and Peonies,” strikes a slightly less painful note. In spring, Hall watches Kenyon’s beloved flowers burst open and though “grief’s repeated particles suffuse the air” still, he carries “one magnanimous blossom indoors” to float it in a glass bowl, as Kenyon once did. Outside, the remaining peonies lean their heads toward the setting sun, and “some topple,” but, for Hall, life must move on.

“The anguish of loss strikes like a fist,” said The Atlantic Monthly in a review of Without. The metaphor, like the ship pounding, is apt, but it doesn’t quite tell the whole story. The book is also a gift, offering those who open it a rare opportunity to be within the grieving process — thereby appreciating more fully what it is like to be without.

Editor’s note: All excerpts from Without, by Donald Hall. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998.

Must Reads is an opportunity for Literature & Medicine facilitators to review good texts for Literature & Medicine seminars. A fixture of every Synapse issue, Must Reads will have a rotating authorship. We invite any Literature & Medicine facilitator to submit a review of a reading that may have gone unnoticed by other groups.

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Literature & Medicine has received major support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.