Poetry of and About Cancer: Moira Linehan

Poet Moira Linehan will be reading this Saturday at 11:30 am at Market Block Books in Troy, New York.

Her poetry collection depicts her life as both a cancer caregiver and as a cancer patient. Her beautiful, elegant and honest poems began in her husband's last year of life and then continue into her own breast cancer diagnosis years later.

Here is the description of her new volume on Amazon:

After learning she has breast cancer, the poet struggles to live an examined life. Alienated and estranged from her own body, she turns her cancer into “these binoculars, / this new way of looking,” and uses it as a way of fixing herself firmly within the moment. As she travels Ireland and the Pacific Northwest, her busy mind moves from the knot in her breast to the knots in her knitting to the illuminated knots of The Book of Kells to the tossing, knotted surface of the sea; from the margins of her surgery—clean but not ideal—to the margins of illuminated manuscripts. She links the mundane to the mythic, intertwining connections between scripture and nature, storms and loss, winter and light, breast cancer and embroidery. As she returns to her home on a small pond in Massachusetts, she takes with her the fruits of her travels: the incarnate grace of the ordinary.  

Poetry of Cancer--Jane Kenyon- Donald Hall

Jane Kenyon and Donald Hall: Poets, lovers, husband and wife. Both had cancer . Donald, much older, lived. Jane, much younger, died. But, both being poets, had the habit of turning their life experiences into poems. So we have poetry collections from each of them describing each turn and phase of their roles as caregivers and as patients. It’s fascinating to read them together and to trace the intrusion and trajectory of cancer through their loving—and sexy—marriage.

Here is a poem by Jane Kenyon when she is ill and Donald is her caregiver:

    I saw him leaving the hospital

    with a woman's coat over his arm.

    Clearly she would not need it.

    The sunglasses he wore could not

    conceal his wet face, his bafflement.

    As if in mockery the day was fair,

    and the air mild for December. All the same

    he had zipped his own coat and tied

    the hood under his chin, preparing

    for irremediable cold.

                        Coats, by Jane Kenyon