Geoff Page's Canberra Times review of Book of Mother

 

https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/7832168/poetry-in-dementias-double-death/?cs=14061

 Book of Mother.  By Kit Kelen. Puncher & Wattmann. pp 123  $25

 

Reviewed by Geoff Page

 

Dementia (and its subset, Alzheimer’s Disease) is closer to all of us than we care to admit. Most of us have had an elderly relative who showed at least signs of it and for anyone over 70 the Wikipedia entry on the subject can be an uneasy experience. It’s probably our least favourite way to die, given that it involves a double death — the death of the mind and personality before that of the body.

 

A whole collection of poems on the disease and its impact on the victim and on those close to him or her may therefore  seem too much for the average reader —  though it would  appear to fulfil Woody Allen’s quip: “I’m not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

 

On the other hand, poetry (or most of it) is essentially about emotion — and the emotions around this topic run as deep as anyone would want, both for the sufferers and for those who’ve experienced it first-hand as family members or carers. So it is that Kit Kelen’s new collection, Book of Mother, is almost certainly the most deeply-felt he has written in his considerable career.

 

Every sentence in this 123-page book is, in one way or another, about his mother’s dementia. It’s certainly not an easy collection  to read, partly because of its distressing content but also because, for much of the time, Kelen is reflecting the disruptions of the disease in his syntax.

 

Words slip away; sentences are left unfinished. We are in the disturbed mind not only of the poet’s mother but of the poet himself. Quite often, and this is deliberate, the identity of the speaker is not clear. There are works which are monologues from the mother and others which are from the poet. Still others replicate the frustrating attempts at dialogue which are also part of the disease.

 

At first all this can be wearing for the reader. He or she begins to wish the book were divided into convenient sections that might offer some respite but instead the series of mainly short poems draws us involuntarily further and further into the complexity and chaos of the situation, not only that of the poet’s mother but also of her son.

 

Some may not be aesthetically “excellent” by traditional criteria but every one contributes somehow to the cumulative effect of the whole. This also makes it a hard book for a reviewer to quote to illustrate adequately his or her observations.

 

Perversely then, the most memorable poems are probably  those few longer ones where the narrative seems to develop a momentum and/or rhetoric of its own. Among these would be “She”, which runs to five pages, and the book’s final poem, “Vale Mum”, which runs to almost three.

 

The third stanza of “She” is typical of the almost Whitmanic momentum (and unorthodox syntax) Kelen develops throughout: “once bright of the dance floor spun / of the time stuck ages before I was / and sung out over the line      make Monday / the mangle, remember? (as neighbour is to fence!) / far and away yet with us / she who could hear a joint being rolled a suburb away / she of preternatural olfaction / prognosticator of clouds”.

 

A second illustration may be found (perhaps unfairly) in the closing lines of the final poem, “Vale Mum”. For most readers, to read this, having worked their way through the rest of the book, will be to be brought close to tears:

 

“now mum is of eternity / whatever, wherever / however that is // we are with her wishes now / soon these ashes, so the sky / over every ocean spread / what if there once were a heaven? / now that heaven’s gone // and mum / I celebrate you were / you are with me / and always”.

 

It’s important to remember how different these lines are  from the occasional verse we typically see in funeral notices. The latter tend to be dense with second-hand, if sincerely felt, sentiment and predictability. Kelen’s lines,  on the other hand,  show all the wildness of the disease and its disturbing impact on everyone connected to it.

 

A further virtue of Book of Mother is how it presents the frustrations of minders and relatives, their expectations of gratitude which are rarely met. The poem, “In a Waiting Room”, begins by quoting the soothing words so pointlessly offered: “to make you happy / for your own good / because we love  you / because I can’t explain // won’t remember your hand was held // in yellow light / dinosaurs confer / smoke clouds them / or at cards // here elephants trumpet about / giraffe pokes in a head”. The words of the carer merely vanish into the surreal visions of the sufferer.

 

In the penultimate stanza (“stood by the fire / too close / to beginning”) we are elliptically given an almost  ludicrous explanation of the disease’s origins, before the poet, in a somewhat resentful dactylic metre, seems, almost bitterly, to dismiss the whole experience: “peg in the board  where everyone fits  / that was my Day at the Zoo.”

 

 

As these excerpts variously indicate, Kit Kelen’s Book of Mother is not an easy experience but it’s an informative, some might say even mandatory, one.