Standing on my Shadow
by Serie Barford and The Venetian Blind Poems
by Paula Green

Serie Barford opens her sixth collection, Standing on my Shadow, with a section of poems that dwell in the abandoned houses and streets of the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. These poems are dappled with concrete detail. ‘Flowers tumbling / from hanging baskets’ and the ‘sweaty imprints of toes’ on a lone, abandoned sandal, apples like ‘baubles zhooshed by spring’ and the grins of ‘beguiling dogs’ bear a loveliness that tangles with the surroundings being ‘toxic ruins’. In this section, just a few poems into the collection, we learn that the poet herself is acutely tangled up in the science of toxicity: her lymph nodes are ‘dancing a cancerous fandango’ and she will fly home from Ukraine ‘to chemotherapy, more surgery, radiotherapy, rongoā Māori, acupuncture’.

The following sections of the collection retreat from the Exclusion Zone to spend most of their time in hospitals, on the way to appointments, or lingering on the peripheral details of patienthood. Still, the language of nuclear disaster haunts the scenes of cancer treatment. In an oncology appointment, Barford’s speaker is disturbed, almost at a cellular level, by the other patients that have shared this space: ‘Energetic residue engulfs me. I’m sitting on a chair radiating the previous patient’s fear.’ The poems explore a deep sensitivity to the energies of others; in one poem, the speaker scrutinises an influencer who is donating her hair that has been ‘permanently injured by trauma’:

I’m appalled. All that toxicity atop vulnerable people
with compromised immunity. Atop their tapu heads!

The body and the spirit enhance and pollute each other. Throughout the collection, hair is one of the main symbols of Barford’s identity. She describes ‘turning sina’ (the Sāmoan term for age turning one’s hair grey) as a cleansing and emboldening element of menopause:

Welcomed the tapu silver cloak growing out of me. Decluttered my wardrobe. Discarded pastels. Adorned bamboo hangers with vivid florals in full bloom. Regaled supporters, naysayers, indifferent spectators with anecdotes. Moisturised religiously. Danced. Loved. Laughed.

It’s not only an experience of freedom, of course – Barford’s knack for complicating an initially declarative stance shines here. Turning sina also turns one into ‘A derided bum. A has-been. An undesirable demographic statistic for inclusive investment purposes.’ Still, this bitter edge is something our speaker embraces too. But all this is complicated yet again by the fact that, after having come to terms with being ’gloriously sina’, she receives a diagnosis of advanced breast cancer. The chemotherapy will take her newly silver hair.

Some of the strongest moments in this collection arise from Barford’s choice to illuminate a small, tender detail in the midst of swarming chaos or impending danger. There is the ‘monster drain that sucks ducklings through stormwater pipes to the sea’ on the morning our speaker makes her way to her cancer treatment. There are the eyelashes like ‘tiny sickle moons’ on her pillow when she wakes up.

Many poems in Standing on my Shadow explore the nature of chemotherapy as a killing process: a toxic drug that robs so much from the body it enters, even as it provides some hope of recovery, perhaps some extra months or years of life. Barford teases out this duality in poems that represent the full spectrum of the treatment process, in which the patient is not only a patient, the keeper of a sick body, but a woman trying to protect her identity and what she holds sacred despite the pressure of clinical pragmatism. She asks a hospital worker to tell her where their centre’s Mānea stone is – at her regular hospital, she touches and prays at the stone before her appointments – but she’s greeted by ‘a puzzled silence. // Reception will get back to [her].’

Even throughout the severing, isolating experiences of surgery, chemotherapy, and receiving an updated prognosis, the waiting room is also a meeting room, a place of profound and immediate connection. Our speaker meets ‘a reclining wahine toa’ in the surgical waiting lounge, a fellow patient who also uses the Mānea stone to anchor herself. The two patients weep with and for each other, forming a bond through ancestry and experience and a brief moment of care.

Though almost every beat of this collection sees our speaker teasing out an element of sickness, treatment, loss or recovery, her voice never wavers. In ‘Sanctuary’, she greets us with stubborn independence as she makes her way through a muddy early morning towards the hospital for a chemotherapy session:

I’ve evaded kind offers of support. Will transport myself to Building 8. Arrive calm, resolute, unfazed by people’s platitudes, advice, grief. The bus is punctual. Speeds over the causeway through thinning darkness.

Barford’s style throughout this collection prioritises the factual and narrative over the lyric, and it’s often in the sparsest, most matter-of-fact sentences that we feel closest to her speaker. ‘The bus is punctual’, so she pushes on, sticking to the rhythm of the everyday, not caught up in the tide of sentiment. Often, though, a poem that has mostly moved steadily onwards at a brisk clip will gather itself up in the final moment with a sentence of a single word. These beats act as touchstones, returning us to the central image or gesture, whether that’s ‘home’ or ‘resist’ or ‘sorry’, or this, the final moment of the book:

Today I’m visiting an oncologist in Building 8. Facing this tricky business of living. Talking about celestial beings. Feeling uplifted by the grace of a stranger.

 

Aroha.

Standing on my Shadow is fierce and unrelenting, never turning away from its task of recording the tangle of loss and connection, the celestial and the perfunctory, the frustration of a rigid healthcare system and the relief of even a brief moment of intimacy in that cold waiting room.

Paula Green’s new collection, The Venetian Blind Poems, shares Barford’s urge to chronicle the complexity of experiences in the world of serious medical treatment. After a diagnosis of blood cancer which progressed to bone marrow cancer, Green spent five and a half weeks in an isolation ward receiving chemotherapy and a stem cell infusion. That period of isolation is where the poems in the collection’s first half arise from, before Green’s speaker emerges into a period of recovery at home.

Green’s syntax is porous and malleable: by my count, leaving aside question marks, not a single line is end-stopped by punctuation. The lines, then, function like blinds themselves, left open enough to let slats of light beam in. The structure of the collection – split into two halves titled ‘The Venetian Blinds’ and ‘The Open Window’, but otherwise made up of untitled clusters of irregular strophes – flows without much interruption or announcement, echoing the perplexing, untethered twilight of serious illness. Pain and tenderness meld into each other, and Green’s lyric tends to spend more time detailing the tenderness, the soup in the fridge, the mouthful of peaches, the harbour just beyond the window, than dwelling in the pain.

The night nurse tiptoes in
uses the night light from there to here
and it’s a sweet voice and it’s darling
and it’s floating on the water

Reading or recalling passages from literature is one of the main events of the first half of the book in particular. Though their setting is restricted to a small hospital room, these fragmented records transcend those physical limits thanks to the speaker’s connection to the endlessly expansive map of other writers’ work. Freedom comes as a gift of the imagination, even when the speaker’s body remains in the same room, isolated and bound by pain. Green’s speaker incessantly recalls, reads and listens to other works of literature – songs (The Mutton Birds’ ‘Dominion Road’), poems (Cilla McQueen’s, which arrives in an envelope), novels (like the works of Maggie O’Farrell) and children’s stories (Dr Seuss gets a mention).

For the speaker in these poems, language provides relief when not much else can – the words are a way out, sometimes, and sometimes a way through.

Living in the present tense
I bake a tiny poem
from the little words in
the little bucket I carry
in the little room in my
little bookshelf head

In the first half of The Venetian Blind Poems, Green’s world is a restricted, physically shrunken-down one, but in the second half, she literally emerges into the wider world. The poems can now contain more than the four walls of that hospital room. The fragments here are often pastoral – we see a flock of starlings, a pluck of fresh tomatoes, a pheasant on the lawn. The concrete world, all its colour and bustle, has returned to the page in abundance.

Yet the constant connection-making with other writers continues even when they are not the poet’s only company. George Saunders gets a mention on the first page of this second section, and eventually, he’s joined by a host of others including Lucinda Williams, Virginia Woolf and Anna Jackson. This is more than simply namechecking other writers; it’s a frequent reminder that Green’s poetic practice is one that gains its momentum by bouncing off the work of other writers. They are never far from her mind.

Gertrude Stein’s rose
floats in a bowl
Pink driftwood clouds

 

Robin Hyde’s irises
in the next jar
Bub Bridger’s wild daisies
Who will eat the ripening plums?

Even after returning to the offerings of the outside world, Green must contend with the mental challenge of recovery. Just as Barford tackles the ‘tricky business of living’, Green asks, ‘How to move through the day?’ Recovery is not a steady upward progression: her speaker is ‘wearing fatigue / like an overcoat’, but she has been offered a life that continues beyond that period of intense treatment, and this is an adventure.

Perhaps I am building a house
for warm winds
open windows open doors

Green and Barford have both produced collections grounded in the day-to-day of pain and survival. Yet within both of these books, there is no shortage of tenderness and connection, and an enduring desire to find one’s place beside others, to relish the ebb and flow of care and energy between people, and to look outwards, searching for the relief of beauty – for what glimmers, despite.