Standing in the Forest of Being Alive

The first person is a slippery perspective. As the writer stands in the shadows, masked and inscrutable, we refer to ‘the speaker’ no matter how tempted we are to conflate the construct with its creator. However, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive is subtitled ‘A Memoir in Poems’ — and as such the first person speaker cannot be sandboxed away from its author. We’re encouraged to view the ‘I’s we encounter as versions of Farris and the poems become intimate spaces, drawing power from proximity to their creator.

The memoir opens with a manifesto: ‘Why Write Love Poetry in a Burning World’. Farris locates herself at the threshold of ‘a door / I cannot close I stand / within its wedge / a shield’. This liminal position re-casts the speaker as Proserpina. Her cancer diagnosis means that she doesn’t just live on Earth, she lives in the Underworld too – and belongs fully to neither. Her position in the threshold, serving as a ‘shield’, figures her as some kind of epic hero. 

The collection explores the challenges we face negotiating medical language. ‘Tell It Slant’ references Emily Dickinson’s ‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant—’, in which the speaker concludes that ‘Truth must dazzle gradually’. The two stanzas of Farris’s poem explore the languages used to discuss cancer. Farris addresses the cancer: ‘You float in the MRI gloam, / several spiculated masses; / I name you “cactus,” / carcinoma be damned’. Perhaps ‘gloam’ lends the growth a poetic warmth and beauty, or perhaps Keats’ ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ springs to mind, as his knight-at-arms envisions the Belle Dame’s previous victims: ‘I saw their starved lips in the gloam, / With horrid warning gapèd wide’. Either way, it’s a rich, beautiful, dreadful way to envisage an MRI. The language of oncology is too precise for the uninitiated. A spiculated mass is a ‘centrally dense lesion’ and, although ‘a classic finding of malignancy on mammography’, ‘its differential diagnosis includes benign lesions’ (Breast Imaging, eds. Christoph I. Lee, Constance D. Lehman and Lawrence W. Bassett, Oxford University Press, 2018). We’re left wondering what this means. Is it cancer? Isn’t it? Is it a threat? Will I be okay? However, if the language of oncology is the sublime – too nuanced, too couched in detail for the uninitiated – then the language of medical admin is the ridiculous, too blunt and tone deaf: ‘a stranger called and said, / You have cancer. Unfortunately. / And then hung up the phone.’ How can a patient negotiate these languages? We’re not doing very well when Dickinson looks a damn sight clearer than medical discourse.

Miraculously, the medical and the poetic begin to converge. In ‘To the Pathologist Reading My Breast, Palimpsest’, Farris credits Kimberley Point du Jour MD, whose report, in its new context, becomes a piece of found poetry: ‘Specimen B, received fresh and subsequently placed in formalin’. And, in this new context, the poet talks back: ‘Dear Doctor—you’ve done my work for me in your first line / with your tidy slanting rhyme of specimen and formalin’. As the poem progresses, Farris works with fluent confidence, riffing and rhyming with the medical report: ‘Beneath my grossly unremarkable skin ellipse / an inscription there of every kiss’ – it’s virtuosic stuff.

In ‘Five Days Before the Mastectomy, Insurrection at the Capitol’, we’re asked ‘What is the door / the bullet makes / in the body?’ and the answer can only be the ungodly mess of an exit wound. No-one can hold the door closed against a force like this. ‘America, the gun— / predictable, mechanical, /  possessed of several chambers’ feels less bicameral and more like a revolver. Farris asks, ‘Who holds you holstered / America the gun?’ We recall Trump’s remarks, made on January 6 – ‘If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore’ – and hope that future presidents can keep the gun buttoned in its holster.

On the face of it, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive is acutely personal, confessional, intimate poetry. However, this enables Farris to explore the fragility of the state and its structures. We’re reminded that we’d be better served listening to our hearts or – perish the thought – to our poets.

Katie Farris’s Standing in the Forest of Being Alive (Pavilion Poetry / Liverpool University Press, 2023) is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2023. John Field blogs at Poor Rude Lines.