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Wishbone Dance (new and selected medical poems)
by Glen Downie
Wolsak and Wynn, 1999.
Reviewed by Shane Neilson
Glen Downie, the recently-appointed Poet-in-Residence of the Medical
Humanities at Dalhousie University in Halifax NS, has published three
books of poetry preceding this current collection, namely An X-Ray
of Longing (1987, Polestar Press), Heartland (1990, Mosaic Press)
and The Angel of Irrational Numbers (1991 Porcepic Books), in which
the author selects the transcendent poems of his previous medical
counseling
work and intersperses them with new ones.
Downie has in the past toiled at innumerable menial tasks, as his
book cover and introduction will have you know; he has also obtained a
Social Work degree and thereby gained access to the medical word which
he, on occasion, eloquently observes. Working in various hospitals in
a counseling capacity, most notably (in term of this book's column inches)
at a cancer clinic, Downie has the opportunity to document the greatest
human struggle: the mortal threat of illness. An interesting perspective,
one that challenges the poet to write words that define observations which
he has the opportunity to capture correctly.
Approaching the unparaphrasability of truly observant, insightful
poetry, Downie chronicles vignettes of sickness in his poems, written
with a measure of empathy and the mysteriousness of the good poet: knowing
he can't approximate another's experience, he dramatizes as facts allow,
and only then ensnares us with observed truth.
In a poem appearing early, "Worker Classification: Material Handler",
Downie declares himself as a member of the working class:
We work in the world
you and I handling
coal chandeliers razor
blades hamburger
whatever they ask
us to carry sort shovel
From this declared vantage point he then deftly links his blue-collar
experience to the white coat happenings of his medical work:
Pat cuts off a cancerous
breast-
the day's work has
begun how does it feel
when a severed breast
slips off into your hand?
In this vein many of his poems convey themselves. He states, "I see
this as poet, and now I'll comment on it". It's fortunate for the reader
that his comments are often worthwhile, as with the conclusion of the
same poem:
This is the way the
world works: you build a house
As I tear one down
we need each other
Hands must be full
of something
As described his poems are liked to the tactile manual experience,
a style which recommends this collection highly: we're blessed with an
eloquent labourer, one who's magically been deposited into a poetic frontier.
Unfortunately, several of the poems are hindered by missteps. Asking
rhetorical questions in verse is perilous, an exercise prone to didactic
lecture. The poet should show, not tell (or ask), and when Downie asks
the reader directly about one bad thing or another, he invites bathos
when compared to his otherwise evocative, lithe poetry. For example, in
"Diagnosis: Heart Failure" he asks the following easy, awkward questions:
Complaints in all
her systems (listen
to her chest The fussy
old sweet
heart's congested)
Can you cough up love?
Can you produce anything
for us?
Wishbone Dance is arranged in several sections based on his experiences
in the health care realm. Many of the poems comprised in the random "Learning
Curve Journal" component of the book are woefully smallish- a few lines
long, they and add nothing to their context. When they do have some basis
in their poetic surroundings, they suffer from obviousness. The second
learning curve journal poem announces its series' failure, transcribed
here in its entirety:
They introduce you
to the water
by throwing you
in the deep end
Welcome to the life
Welcome to the work
A near-death experience
followed by another
& another
& another
Characteristically redundant, clumsy, and indicative of a series
consisting of weird, unrelated and jarring poetic lines that conjure only
frustration at the poet's unevenness; one moment eliciting a gasp at a
particular phrasing, he follows with a groan from his audience, imperfectly
presenting what is better left omitted. That's true also with a few of
the other poems in the book. They grapple with sentimentality and loss,
but they promise much.
Several poems demand comment; these are the aforementioned gasps which
persist after one reads them, so aptly they deliver their meaning. Found
in the first ten pages of the book is "Louise". Initially describing an
incident at a nursing station where the staff comment early in the poem
about an elderly patient with the mind of a child, likely via Alzheimer's
disease, saying "Shoot me if I get like that", Downie delivers:
Let go now
Before hospital policy
changes
& nurses patrol the
wards with
guns in their hands
Tracking down their
own echoes:
Shoot me if I get
like that
It's in images like this that the poet succeeds, using the poetic
turnaround of dimes, where the reader is led one way and then brutally
deflected the next in an unexpected manner. When Downie decides to do
this, he does it admirably, and like few contemporary Canadian poets.
In this collection, it's apparent that a distinguished poet has declared
himself for quantification, for refutation. There exist worthwhile poems
here, a handful that defy comment.
Wolsak and Wynn were right to publish this collection; several of
the poems are prodigious exhibits of meaning, quoting life in distilled
form and pummelling us with the import of their poetic cargo. Downie succeeds
often here, and so exclusively that is should become required reading
for all health professions, but also for everyone else: in death and in
sickness, Downie treads the words we're afraid to hear, the words which
approximate illness as much as poetry can. Life breathes and stops in
his poems; readers are left to discern their human truth, their significance.
Shane
Neilson is a Nova Scotian poet who has published recently in Queen's Quarterly,
The Canadian Forum, and Pottersfield Portfolio. He is one of TDR's
poetry editors.
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