Sarah Jane Barnett
Slip Stream, by Paula Green (Auckland University Press, 2010), 80 pp., $24.95
Slip Stream, by Paula Green (Auckland University Press, 2010), 80 pp., $24.95
How to lean the ladder against the wall or empty / the teapot or make a summer salad with heirloom tomatoes?’ How to carry on as normal while coping with breast cancer? Paula Green’s new collection, Slip Stream, is a brave look at this question. It details Green’s personal journey from the first hint of cancer, through biopsy, radiotherapy, and on to recovery. While the collection talks about her illness, it also asks: how can poetry capture such an experience?
Paula Green lives on the Auckland’s West Coast with her family. She has written four solo collections of poetry, and her previous work draws on food, cooking, art, music and colour. Green has also edited anthologies such as Best New Zealand Poems, 99 Ways into New Zealand Poetry (with Harry Ricketts), and Flamingo Bendalingo, a collection written by Green and fifty children. Her writing has been called subtle and sophisticated; fluid and lyrical.
Slip Stream is Green’s fifth collection of poetry. Before reading the collection I wondered how she would handle the subject of illness; would such a life-changing event lead to sentimental poetics? But the collection appears to have been written some time after Green’s treatment, which allows enough distance for her to talk about her experience while also crafting an intense and grounded collection. At one point she balances talk of ‘love’ with a description of ‘the way birds shit on her car roof.’
Slip Stream is presented as a single long poem without a title or chapter constraints. The form suggests that the strangeness of Green’s experience defies introduction or classification. Each page – which could be considered poems in themselves – differs in length. The effect is an ebb and flow that pulls a reader through the collection and imparts the fluidity of Green’s experience. Her illness makes time expand and contract, and she escapes into crosswords, books, and music to dampen her fear.
The unrelenting presence of normal life reoccurs as a theme. Green attempts to find her groove, but illness colours her experience. She notices and appreciates the mundane: ‘Time to hang out the washing … cook dinner … read the newspaper … pot some herbs. / Time to stop and smell the roses.’ Food and landscape are celebrated – the sensory pleasures. Green’s illness also creates distance between herself and her family, and it is in these sections that Green touches on the true damage of her illness. Her daughters are ‘cautious’ and ‘pale’ when dealing with their mother. While recovering in bed, ‘The telephone will always ring at a distance,’ and people talk ‘in a miniature voice / like a message in a bottle.’
As with previous work, Slip Stream includes a series of lists. This could be seen as a welcome shadow of her last book, Making Lists for Frances Hodgkins (AUP, 2007). It could also be seen as an act of comfort: where poetry goes during illness. The book challenges the reader to consider what is and is not poetry:
The first morning
the first man
opened the course booklet
and said, now that is not
a poem. Turning your day
into a list, I mean, it really isn’t a poem!
The long form and subject matter make me want to liken Green’s work to that of Jenny Bornholdt and Anne Kennedy: good company. But Slip Stream is more surreal and displacing. The reader is distanced from Green’s physical pain and fear, partly because the collection is in the third person. This decision could be because the experience still doesn’t feel like her own. Or maybe it is Green’s way to make sure the collection is received as poetry rather than memoir.
When Green talks about the physical manifestations of her illness – ‘She … wants to cry out of her raw skin’ – I don’t feel afraid or unable to escape from her pain. The collection is a dream of brightness: ‘Everything seems so real / it becomes unreal’ she says, and this speaks to the way she coped with her illness, and the nature of illness itself. Green recognises the limits of language in recreating her experience. She talks about medical rhetoric, and the way we fool ourselves with diversions. The many references to crosswords show a woman trying to understand the cryptic nature of her illness.
In the final pages, the book talks about Green’s return to poetry. She finds comfort in metaphor. Personally I find comfort in Green’s considered retelling of her experience. The book focuses on her methods of coping, and what she has to lose, rather than on the drama inherent in medical experiences. Her light touch makes for an engrossing collection that tells an intriguing and unexpected story of illness.
SARAH JANE BARNETT is a poet and reviewer who lives in Wellington. Her reviews have appeared in New Zealand Books, The Lumière Reader, FishHead Magazine, and Victorious Magazine. Sarah is currently completing a creative writing PhD in the field of ecopoetics.
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