English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

Confronting Illness

Jayne Fenton Keane.  The Transparent Lung.  Post Pressed,  2003.  155 pp.  $24.00AU.  

By Liz Hall-Downs

            Queensland poet Jayne Fenton Keane’s third collection is a verse narrative, or long "poem for voices," told from four different points of view, that documents a family’s confrontation with the life-threatening illness of one of its members. A father is diagnosed with lung cancer. His reactions, and those of his wife, son and daughter are told in short, filmic episodes, all in the first person.  Each short poem is preceded by directives such as one would find in a film script, specifying, variously, "montage," "close-up," "claymation," "through a megaphone," "mis-en-scene," "back projection," "body double," and "black and white," or by metaphorical positions such as "wife-woman on a call sheet," "tarot," "reflections of a mother in broth," and "deck of stubbies."  These directives serve to add an extra component to the reader’s experience of the poetry, containing each poetic episode within a visual or emotional structure that approximates the feelings of the speakers.

            JFK is well-known as an accomplished and intense performer of her own work, and the evolution of these poems as texts for performance, as well as poetry for the page, owes much to recent developments in contemporary poetics towards the stage, the internet, and hypertext.  The work is intensely "modern," recognizing and exploiting the contemporary reader’s familiarity with filmic, episodic structures, an approach begun in her previous collection, the verse novel, Ophelia’s Codpiece (2002). The earlier work, however, though containing powerful phrases and metaphors, was often somewhat obfuscatory, as if the poet was attempting to communicate impressions and feelings while simultaneously being self-protective. In much the same way as Plath’s early, wordy work evolved into the straight-talking and emotionally risky Ariel, JFK seems to have been motivated in this new work to jump feet-first into dangerous emotional territory, splaying out the facts and feelings of a family confronting illness, with all that experience’s hope, despair, and sense of loss of control over both the body and external events, without flinching. This clarity is a strength, and JFK’s truthfulness allows us an intimate glimpse into the characters’ inner turmoil.

            Metaphors are extended throughout the collection: the father’s doctor has an "important hand" that appears to be "conducting" his patient’s life like a musical score.  The cancer patient feels an "eel" inside him, "eating my nerves / swallowing me / from the inside" (46). The daughter’s desperate search for cures using herbal and Aboriginal recipes and her affinity with the growing things in her garden is punctuated with a sequence on flesh-eating plants that mirrors her perception of what is happening to the father. The son’s world is inhabited by fish, the act of fishing, a lover who is tattooed all over as a mermaid, a fishhook that pierces a tongue. The wife searches for ways to bridge the long-held silences in her marriage with broth-making and distances herself with puzzles.

            The financial and emotional tolls of diagnosis and treatment are confronted with humor as well as pathos. In "Talk and Grow Rich," the father considers what he will do if he is cured: "If I survive this / I will cruise the / seminar rounds / with snapshots / of my before / and after body" (43).  The plight of the terminally ill in general is railed against by the daughter, providing a broader social canvas that refers to the recent "right-to-die" debates, reinvigorated by the death of Nancy Crick and the beliefs of her supporters ("Daughter contemplating nietzsche"): "I don’t want my father to end up in Medicare’s gutted / chambers. Not in this age, where 75 percent of older / people who kill themselves, choose death by hanging" (41).  The realities of an overburdened and under-funded health system are communicated in angry lines about "superannuation gluttony" and "hogs-at-the-trough CEO’s" and their "carnage of avarice."

            The Transparent Lung is a clear and unflinching look at a terrible and all-too-common experience, and JFK's work will be welcomed by cancer sufferers and survivors, as well as regular readers of poetry, for its bravery and raw honesty.