Notes and References

199

Cancer Poetry: An Introduction

1. Paul Muldoon, Horse Latitudes (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006), p. 106.

2. Margaret Knowles and Peter Selby (eds), Introduction to the Cellular and Molecular Biology of Cancer, 4th edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. ix.

3. Heart attacks have certainly been more frequently the subject of comedy and exaggerated speech than cancer.

4. This is according to Cancer Research UK (http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/cancer-help/about-cancer/cancer-questions/how-many-different-types-of-cancer-are-there, accessed 18 December 2012). However, Lauren Pecorino states that ‘Over 100 types of cancer have been classified’ (Lauren Pecorino, Molecular Biology of Cancer: Mechanisms, Targets, and Therapeutics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 2).

5. It is equally difficult to find cancer represented explicitly in prose fiction before the 20th century; tuberculosis was written about much more fre-quently. There is a possible allusion to cancer in Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), but in 20th-century prose fiction, cancer appears either literally, metaphorically or both in Arnold Bennett’s novel Riceyman Steps (1923), Edith Wharton’s story ‘Diagnosis’ (1930), Thomas Mann’s novella The Black Swan (1954) and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward (1967).

6. Since age is the biggest risk factor for cancer, and life expectancy is higher, the incidence of cancer is higher today. Paul Scotting writes that before 1800, life expectancy was around 40–45. In developed countries, life expectancy has increased to around 80: ‘Our bodies now provide the necessary time for cancer to develop and so it has become one of the most common causes of death’ (Paul Scotting, Cancer: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: Oneworld, 2010), p. 6).

7. Wilfred Owen, Poems, ed. Jon Stallworthy (London: The Hogarth Press, 1985), p. 117.

8. A similarly indiscriminate disease, influenza, would claim tens of millions of lives in the pandemic of 1918–20.

9. Leonard M. Franks and Margaret A. Knowles, ‘What is cancer?’, Introduction to the Cellular and Molecular Biology of Cancer, pp. 1–24, at p. 1.

10. Nicholas James, Cancer: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 1. In 2000, cancer was diagnosed in 10 million people world-wide, and caused 6.2 million deaths.

11. Naomi Allen, Robert Newton, Amy Berrington de Gonzalez, Jane Green, Emily Banks, and Timothy J. Key, ‘The causes of cancer’, Introduction to the Cellular and Molecular Biology of Cancer, pp. 25–44, at p. 25. The authors cite the World Health Organization in 2003.

12. James, p. 5.

Notes and References

200 Notes and References

13. James, pp. 8–10.14. Pecorino, p. 10.15. In developed countries, due to better nutrition and more plentiful protein,

puberty occurs earlier than in the past, while greater use of contraception and more plentiful education mean that pregnancy occurs later.

16. Smoking is responsible for causing more than a dozen types of cancer, including over four in five cases of lung cancer (according to Cancer Research UK (http://www.cancerresearchukorg/cancer-info/healthyliving/smokingandtobacco/smoking-and-cancer, accessed 18 December 2012)).

17. Allen et al., Introduction to the Cellular and Molecular Biology of Cancer, pp. 33–4.

18. Allen et al., Introduction to the Cellular and Molecular Biology of Cancer, p. 41. This risk can be recessively determined (two defective copies of the same gene, one inherited from each parent), or dominantly determined (one sin-gle copy of the defective gene from one parent).

19. James, p. 24.20. James, p. 25.21. Regardless of carcinogenic factors, there is a relatively fine line between a

healthy cell and a cancer cell. Scotting writes that ‘The frequency of muta-tion resulting accidentally from the imperfect nature of DNA replication is about one mutation in any given gene in every 10,000,000 (107) cell divisions’ (Scotting, p. 26). If the human cell contains – at a conservative estimate – around 21,000 genes (ordered in 23 chromosomes), there will be abnormalities in 40 to 60 genes, or in other words, as James puts it, there will be 40 to 60 typographic errors in the library of 23 approximately 1,000-page books that make up the human genome (James, p. 76).

22. Franks and Knowles, Introduction to the Cellular and Molecular Biology of Cancer, p. 3. The more highly differentiated a cell is, for example, if it is a muscle or nerve cell, the less likely it is to be able to divide.

23. Sonia Lain and David P. Lane, ‘Tumour suppressor genes’, Introduction to the Cellular and Molecular Biology of Cancer, pp. 135–55, at p. 137.

24. Apoptosis is the phenomenon of cells self-destructing when they are no longer necessary.

25. Pecorino, p. 3. In 2011, in ‘Hallmarks of Cancer: The Next Generation’, Hanahan and Weinberg proposed a further two enabling characteristics, ‘genome instability and tumor-promoting inflammation’, as well as two emerging characteristics (there is evidence of their importance, but further research is required): ‘reprogramming energy metabolism and avoiding immune destruction’ (Pecorino, p. 3). See D. Hanahan and R. A. Weinberg, ‘The Hallmarks of Cancer’, Cell, vol. 100, no. 1 (2000), pp. 57–70, and D. Hanahan and R. A. Weinberg, ‘Hallmarks of Cancer: The Next Generation’, Cell, vol. 144, no. 5 (2011), pp. 646–74.

26. Some more terminology: epithelium (tissue-specific cells), and mesenchyme or mesoderm cells (supporting tissue cells): ‘Approximately 85% of cancers occur in epithelial cells and are classified as carcinomas. Cancers derived from mesoderm cells (e.g. bone, muscle) are called sarcomas, and cancers of glandular tissue (e.g. breast) are called adenocarcinomas’ (Pecorino, p. 2). The other two major groups of cancers are the lymphomas (arising in the lymph nodes) and the leukaemias (arising in the bone marrow).

Notes and References 201

27. Terry Priestman describes how each of the three major kinds of cancer treat-ment ‘has its strengths and weaknesses. Surgery is very good if a primary cancer is still quite small and hasn’t spread. But it can’t be used for big cancers, or when there are multiple secondary cancers in different parts of the body. Radiotherapy is good at treating some primary cancers, and can often cover a wider area of tissue than it would be safe to remove in an operation, and it can help ease symptoms from some secondary cancers. Chemotherapy is fairly ineffective against most primary cancers (although the haematological cancers, the leukaemias, lymphomas and myeloma are an exception to this rule), but has a valuable role in preventing or treating the secondary spread of a cancer’ (Terry Priestman, Coping with Radiotherapy (London: Sheldon Press, 2007), p. 18).

28. United States National Cancer Act of 1971, http://legislative.cancer.gov/history/phsa/1971, accessed 18 December 2012.

29. James, p. 3.30. Nevertheless, 70 per cent of all cancers develop in people over 60 years old,

so even if cancer were eradicated, the average lifespan might not be consider-ably longer.

31. Three types of radiotherapy are teletherapy (external beam therapy); brachy-therapy (a source of ionizing radiation is placed close to or inside a cancer; this is used in cervical and prostate cancer treatment); and systemic radio-isotope therapy (a radioactive substance is swallowed or injected; the isotope then concentrates in certain tissues or organs and irradiates them; this is used in the treatment of thyroid cancer).

32. Radiotherapy is not just curative, but can also be used to alleviate the symp-toms of terminal cancer. Since the treatment is targeted, side effects are localized – including hair loss and skin changes – apart from fatigue.

33. Pecorino, p. 13.34. Franks and Knowles, Introduction to the Cellular and Molecular Biology of

Cancer, pp. 3–4. There remains some reservation towards the principle of embryonic stem cell research, and at times active opposition to it, by the United States pro-life movement, which is associated with several Christian groups and, ironically, opposed to abortion and the termination of the long-term comatose and brain-damaged.

35. Barbara Ehrenreich, ‘Welcome to Cancerland’, Harper’s Magazine (November 2001), http://www.barbaraehrenreich.com/cancerland.htm, accessed 18 December 2012.

36. Jackie Stacey, Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 81.

37. Stacey, p. 64.38. Titles rescinded by USADA (United States Anti-Doping Agency) on 24 August

2012.39. Stacey, p. 12.40. Lance Armstrong with Sally Jenkins, It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back

to Life (New York: Berkley, 2000), p. 259.41. Stacey, p. 12.42. Ruth Picardie, Before I Say Goodbye (London: Penguin, 1998), p. 13.43. Lisa Diedrich, Treatments: Language, Politics, and the Culture of Illness

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), p. 68.


44. Stacey, p. 16.45. Donald Hall, ‘The Third Thing’, Poetry (November 2004), http://www.poet-

ryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/146874, accessed 18 December 2012.

46. Harold Varmus and Robert A. Weinberg, Genes and the Biology of Cancer (New York: The Scientific American Library, 1993), p. 1.

47. Armstrong, p. 97.48. Elisabeth Grosz, ‘Julia Kristeva’, in Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical

Dictionary, ed. Elizabeth Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 194–200, at p. 198.

49. Lawrence Goldie with Jane Desmarais, Psychotherapy and the Treatment of Cancer Patients: Bearing Cancer in Mind (Hove: Routledge, 2005), p. 60.

50. Robert Bor, Carina Eriksen and Ceilidh Stapelkamp, Coping with the Psychological Effects of Cancer (London: Sheldon Press, 2010), pp. 10–20.

51. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Picador, 1990), p. 20.

52. Sontag, p. 65.53. This tension is epitomized in Margaret Edson’s 1995 play W;t, when

Dr Kelekian is explaining Vivian’s diagnosis: his statement that ‘“Insidious” means undetectable at an—’ is interrupted by Vivian, who insists, ‘“Insidious” means treacherous’ (Margaret Edson, W;t (New York: Faber & Faber, 1999), p. 8).

54. Phyllis Hoge Thompson, in Her Soul beneath the Bone: Women’s Poetry on Breast Cancer, ed. Leatrice H. Lifshitz (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), p. xx.

55. Lifshitz, p. xvi. Kushner is referring to Phyllis Thompson’s introduction to the anthology.

56. Sontag, p. 93.57. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By [1980] (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 244.58. Ehrenreich, ‘Welcome to Cancerland’.59. Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals [1980] (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books,

1997), p. 58.60. Denis Donoghue, ‘Disease Should Be Itself’, review of Illness as Metaphor

by Susan Sontag, New York Times Book Review (16 July 1978), http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/03/12/specials/sontag-illness.html, accessed 18 December 2012.

61. Julia Darling, Sudden Collapses in Public Places (Todmorden: Arc Publications, 2003), p. 16.

62. Christopher Hitchens, Mortality (New York: Twelve, 2012), p. 3.63. Sontag, p. 3.64. Hitchens, p. 28, p. 8, p. 12.65. Picardie, p. 9.66. John Diamond, C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too (London: Vermilion,

1998), p. 36.67. Stacey, p. 61.68. Hitchens, p. 11.69. W. H. Auden, Selected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York, Vintage:

2007), p. 59.


70. If the name carries the sense of the American interjection, it seems a heavily ironic marker for such an unremarkable person.

71. Auden, p. 61.72. Philip Larkin, Collected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1988), p. 97.73. Larkin, p. 149.74. James Dickey, The Eye-beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy

(Garden City: Doubleday, 1969), p. 31.75. Dickey, p. 32.76. ‘Oh wearisome condition of humanity! / Born under one law, to another

bound: / Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity, / Created sick, commanded to be sound’ (Fulke Greville, ‘Chorus Sacerdotum’, from Mustapha (1609), Selected Poems, ed. Thom Gunn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 149).

77. Christopher Reid, A Scattering (Oxford: Areté, 2009), p. 27.78. Peter Davison, ‘Under the Roof of Memory’, in Inventions of Farewell: A Book

of Elegies, ed. Sandra M. Gilbert (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), p. 245.79. Davison, in Gilbert, p. 246.80. Frank Bidart, ‘The Sacrifice’, in Gilbert, p. 60.81. Fleur Adcock, ‘The Soho Hospital for Women’, in The Norton Anthology of

Poetry, 4th edn, ed. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stallworthy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), p. 1744.

82. Adcock, in Ferguson et al., pp. 1744–5.83. Adcock, in Ferguson et al., p. 1745.84. We could compare a phrase at the end of Sylvia Plath’s breakthrough work,

‘Poem for a Birthday’, where the speaker describes her recovery in terms of itchiness, suggesting a restlessness that will inevitably lead back to hospital (Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1981), p. 137).

85. Adcock, in Ferguson et al., pp. 1745–6.86. Larkin, pp. 208–9.

1 Spousal Cancer: The Flowering of Grief

1. John Milton, The Complete English Poems (London: Everyman, 1992), p. 54.2. The collection had different titles: Justa Edouardo King Naufrago, Justa Edovardo

King Naufrago, and Justa Eduardo King.3. Nicholas Wroe, ‘Speaking from experience’, profile of Douglas Dunn (18

January 2003), http//:www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/jan/18/featuresre-views.guardianreview24, accessed 14 November 2012.

4. Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam, ed. Erik Gray (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), lv, p. 40. Tennyson wanted his original underestimate of ‘fifty’ to be replaced by ‘myriad’.

5. Milton, p. 55.6. In a remarkable example of elegiac deference, Hall barely mentions his own

cancer throughout Without and The Painted Bed.7. Hall’s prose account is The Best Day the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon

(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005).8. Donald Hall, Without (Boston: Mariner Books, 1998), p. 1.9. Hall, Without, p. 2.


10. Hall, Without, p. 3.11. Hall, Without, p. 14.12. Donald Hall in conversation with Judith Moore, Poetry Daily (1998), http://

www.cstone.net/~poems/halinter.htm, accessed 14 November 2012.13. It is not the purpose of this analysis to identify the exact kind of mourning

Hall is experiencing. Classifications of mourning are notoriously difficult, since symptoms may be posited as being common to distinct categories. For instance, the editors of New Challenges in Communication with Cancer Patients identify ‘Persistent anger or guilt response rather than acceptance of death’ as a marker of ‘Avoidance of grief’ (Antonella Surbone, Matjaž Zwitter, Mirjana Rajer and Richard Stiefel (eds), New Challenges in Communication with Cancer Patients (New York: Springer, 2013), p. 70), while Sigmund Freud in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ identifies ‘a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings’ as a symptom of melancholia (pathological), a condition distinct from mourning (normal) (Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ [1917], in The Complete Psychological Works, vol. XIV, ed. and trans. James Strachey, pp. 243–58 (London: Vintage, 2001), at p. 244). In literary criticism, Jahan Ramazani conflates Freud’s categories to identify a type of ‘“melancholic” mourning’ in the work of modern elegists, symptoms of which include their ‘unresolved’ and ‘violent’ character, and ‘their intense criticism and self-criticism’ (Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 4); Hall’s elegies may contain self-reproach, but no ‘criticism’ of the dead. It may be reason-able to conclude that attempting to categorize mourning involves diminish-ing or obfuscating the complexity of the experience.

14. Hall, Without, p. 13.15. Hall, Without, p. 19.16. Hall, Without, p. 22. Total body irradiation is used to treat cancers like leu-

kaemia and lymphoma. The aim is to destroy cancer cells in the bone mar-row. The patient receives a bone-marrow transplant after the treatment.

17. James, p. 25.18. Hall, Without, p. 45.19. Hall, Without, p. 58.20. Freud, The Complete Psychological Works, vol. XIV, p. 244.21. It is difficult to tell whether this earth-shaking experience is an orgasm,

or, as Peter Makuck suggests in a 2001 article, flatulence (Peter Makuck, ‘Donald Hall: Exile and the Kingdom’, Sewanee Review, vol. 119, no. 1 (2011), pp. 139–49, at p. 144).

22. Hall, Without, p. 67.23. Hall, Without, p. 71.24. Hall, Without, p. 73.25. William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral [1935] (London: Chatto &

Windus, 1950), p. 23.26. Hall, Without, p. 62.27. Tennyson addresses the ‘Old Yew, which graspest at the stones / That name

the under-lying dead, / Thy fibres net the dreamless head, / Thy roots are wrapped about the bones.’ The tree does not experience ‘the glow, the bloom’, as the poet, ‘gazing on thee, sullen tree, / Sick for thy stubborn


hardihood’, seems ‘to fail from out my blood / And grow incorporate into thee’ (Tennyson, In Memoriam, ii, p. 7).

28. Donald Hall, ‘The Third Thing’.29. Henry King, ‘An Exequy to His Matchless, Never-to-Be-Forgotten Friend’, in

The Norton Anthology of Poetry, pp. 328–9.30. Hall, Without, p. 81.31. Donald Hall, The Painted Bed (Boston: Mariner Books, 2002), p. 3.32. Hall, The Painted Bed, p. 7.33. Hall, The Painted Bed, pp. 7–8.34. See Horace, Odes Book 1: 11, trans. James Michie (London: Penguin, 1967),

pp. 38–9.35. Hall, The Painted Bed, p. 43.36. Hall, The Painted Bed, p. 52.37. R. Clifton Spargo, The Ethics of Mourning: Grief and Responsibility in Elegiac

Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), p. 13.38. Hall, The Painted Bed, p. 48.39. Spargo, p. 19.40. Hall, The Painted Bed, p. 87.41. Reid, A Scattering, p. 11.42. Reid, A Scattering, p. 12.43. Christopher Hitchens commented on the inaccuracy of combative language

in relation to his oesophageal cancer, writing that ‘I’m not fighting or bat-tling cancer – it’s fighting me’ (Hitchens, p. 89).

44. Reid, A Scattering, p. 18.45. Reid, A Scattering, p. 19.46. Reid, A Scattering, p. 14.47. Reid, A Scattering, p. 32.48. In Japanese Buddhist funerals, after the burning of the body, some of the

bones of the dead are picked up with chopsticks and placed in an urn, from the feet bones first, up to the head (so the dead will not remain upside down).

49. Reid, A Scattering, p. 38.50. Reid, A Scattering, p. 39.51. Reid, A Scattering, p. 40.52. Reid, A Scattering, p. 45.53. This is implied in a description where Lucinda blends into the flowers while

working, where she seems ‘to have vanished until I spotted you / bent over or squatting in the midst of some urgent green handiwork’ (Reid, A Scattering, p. 60).

54. Reid, A Scattering, p. 48.55. Reid, A Scattering, p. 49.56. Reid, A Scattering, p. 61.57. Reid, A Scattering, p. 62.58. Douglas Dunn, Elegies (London: Faber & Faber, 1985), p. 53.59. Dunn, in Reading Douglas Dunn, ed. Robert Crawford and David Kinloch

(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), p. 10, p. 14.60. Dunn, Elegies, p. 11.61. Dunn, Elegies, p. 33.62. Dunn, Elegies, p. 12.


63. Dunn, Elegies, p. 53.64. Dunn, Elegies, p. 17.65. Dunn, Elegies, p. 22.66. Dunn, Elegies, pp. 33–4.67. Dunn, Elegies, p. 38.68. Dunn, Elegies, p. 45.69. Dunn, Elegies, p. 46.70. Dunn, Elegies, p. 51.71. Dunn, Elegies, p. 52. A ‘falling-off-of-petals’ would translate the Greek word

‘apoptosis’, the normal process of cell death that is overridden in the growth of cancer. The phrase indicates that Dunn’s grief is no longer cancerous.

72. Dunn, Elegies, p. 62.73. John Keats, The Complete Poems (London: Penguin, 1973), p. 452.74. Dunn, Elegies, p. 64.75. Dunn, Elegies, p. 42.

2 Parental Cancer: The Functions of Repression

1. Edwin Morgan, A Book of Lives (Manchester: Carcanet, 2007), p. 62. 2. Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

2002), p. 3. 3. In Mortality, Christopher Hitchens notes how he ‘Always prided myself on

my reasoning faculty and my stoic materialism. I don’t have a body, I am a body. Yet consciously and regularly acted as if this was not true, or as if an exception would be made in my case. Feeling husky and tired on tour? See the doctor when it’s over!’ (Hitchens, p. 86). Such an irrational conception of dualism allows the discourse of attitudinally ‘battling’ cancer to flourish.

4. In W. B. Yeats’s ‘Shepherd and Goatherd’, his eclogic elegy for Major Robert Gregory, the Shepherd says, ‘I am looking for strayed sheep; / Something has troubled me and in my trouble / I let them stray. I thought of rhyme alone, / For rhyme can beat a measure out of trouble’ (W. B. Yeats, The Collected Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 142).

5. In section v of In Memoriam A. H. H., Tennyson describes how ‘words, like Nature, half reveal / And half conceal the Soul within’, and that, like clothes, ‘that large grief which these enfold / Is given in outline and no more’ (Tennyson, In Memoriam, v, p. 9).

6. Plath, p. 224. 7. Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 14. 8. See Sacks, pp. 8–17. For the purposes of Sacks’s mourning / language argu-

ment, the oedipal process is the same for female as well as male poets. 9. Sharon Olds, The Father [1992] (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009), p. 2.10. Olds, The Father, p. 43, pp. 35–6.11. Olds, p. 70.12. Olds, p. 66.13. Olds, p. 71.14. Olds, p. 3.15. See Memoires: for Paul de Man (1986), The Gift of Death (1995), Politics of

Friendship (1997), and The Work of Mourning (2001).


16. Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Shocken Books, 1985), p. 57.

17. ‘Imagined’ refers to the nature of the relationship after death. It is no less real for being imagined.

18. Olds, p. 10.19. Olds, p. 7.20. David Kennedy, Elegy (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 86.21. Olds, p. 14.22. Harold Schweizer, Suffering and the Remedy of Art (New York: State University

of New York, 1997), p. 173.23. Olds, p. 31.24. Olds, p. 34.25. Olds, p. 39.26. Plath, p. 222.27. Melissa F. Zeiger, Beyond Consolation: Death, Sexuality, and the Changing Shapes

of Elegy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 174.28. Olds, p. 42.29. Olds, p. 7, p. 17.30. Olds, p. 48.31. Olds, pp. 50–1.32. Olds, p. 66.33. Olds, p. 73.34. Olds, p. 74.35. James T. Patterson, The Dread Disease: Cancer and Modern American Culture

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 151.36. Barbara Clow, ‘Who’s Afraid of Susan Sontag? or, the Myths and Metaphors

of Cancer Reconsidered’, Social History of Medicine, vol. 14, no. 2 (2001), pp. 293–312, at p. 297.

37. Patterson, p. 197.38. Patterson, p. 210.39. Anne Sexton, The Collected Poems (New York: Mariner, 1981), p. 38.40. Zeiger, p. 145.41. Sexton, The Collected Poems, pp. 41–2.42. Sexton, The Collected Poems, p. 43.43. Sexton, The Collected Poems, p. 45.44. Sexton, The Collected Poems, p. 46.45. Sexton, The Collected Poems, p. 56.46. Sexton, letter to W. D. Snodgrass (18 November 1959), Anne Sexton: A Self-

Portrait in Letters, ed. Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames (New York: Mariner Books, 2004), p. 91.

47. ‘Medusa’, addressed to Plath’s mother, was written on 16 October 1962, and ‘Daddy’ on 12 October 1962.

48. Sexton, The Collected Poems, p. 58.49. Sexton, The Collected Poems, p. 59.50. Sexton, The Collected Poems, p. 315.51. Paul Muldoon, The Annals of Chile (London: Faber & Faber, 1994), p. 39.52. Muldoon, The Annals of Chile, p. 43.53. The ovarian cancer may have metastasized: Muldoon writes that it is

‘Uterine’ cancer at another point (The Annals of Chile, p. 177).54. Muldoon, The Annals of Chile, p. 78.


55. Muldoon, The Annals of Chile, p. 154.56. Muldoon, ‘Between Ireland and Montevideo’, quoted in Peter McDonald,

Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 176.

57. Since ‘Yarrow’ uses the same rhyme words as ‘Incantata’, it is in this sense a metastasis of that poem, which is located earlier in The Annals of Chile.

58. Muldoon, The Annals of Chile, p. 177.59. Like cancer, the structure only shows up under close scrutiny.60. Muldoon, The Annals of Chile, p. 54.61. Muldoon, The Annals of Chile, p. 189.62. Muldoon, The Annals of Chile, p. 91.63. Muldoon, The Annals of Chile, p. 14.64. Muldoon, The Annals of Chile, p. 189. Muldoon translates the poem where

the phrase originates as ‘César Vallejo: Testimony’ (Muldoon, The Annals of Chile, p. 32).

65. Presumably, Muldoon is writing the poem on a computer, not by hand.66. Muldoon, The Annals of Chile, p. 189.67. John Masefield, Spunyarn: Sea Poetry and Prose, ed. Philip W. Errington

(London: Penguin, 2011), p. 24. Masefield’s first voyage as a teenager was to Chile.

68. Paul Muldoon, Poems 1968–1998 (London: Faber & Faber, 2001), p. 193.69. In the UK, attaching a stamp so the monarch’s head is upside down is sup-

posedly, but not actually, a treasonable offence.70. Muldoon, Poems 1968–1998, p. 155.71. An escape to South America is often figured as an alternative life in

Muldoon’s work, as in ‘Immrama’ and ‘Brazil’.72. A tornado that occurs over sea is called a ‘waterspout’.73. Michael Longley, Collected Poems (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), p. 30.74. Longley, p. 31.75. In terms of the poem’s contemporary social subject, Northern Ireland, it

is difficult to assess the war’s consequences. Was a weakened, victorious British Empire less willing, or less able, to commit resources to the Irish War of Independence? If the First World War had been avoided, would the Government of Ireland Act 1914 have been passed, creating a more cohesive peace than that of 1920?

76. Longley, p. 62.77. Longley, p. 63.78. Michael Ignatieff, ‘The Nightmare from Which We Are Trying to Awake’, The

Warrior’s Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (New York: Holt, 1997), pp. 164–90, at p. 168.

3 Locating Breast Cancer

1. Cathy Read, introduction to Cancer: Through the Eyes of Ten Women (London: Pandora Press, 1997), ed. Patricia Duncker and Vicky Wilson; quoted in Living on the Margins: Women Writers on Breast Cancer, ed. Hilda Raz (New York: Persea Books, 1999), p. xv.

2. Raz, p. xv.


3. James, pp. 8–10. Male breast cancer accounts for less than 1 per cent of breast cancer cases.

4. Raz, p. vii. 5. Lucille Clifton, ‘lumpectomy eve’, in Raz, p. 172. 6. Raz, p. viii. 7. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘White Glasses’ (1991), in Raz, pp. 57–75, at p. 70. 8. Bor, Eriksen and Stapelkamp identify six main psychological preoccupations

for cancer patients: ‘managing uncertainty’, ‘searching for meaning’, ‘deal-ing with a loss of control’, ‘a need for openness in relationships’, ‘a need for emotional support’ and ‘a need for medical support’ (Bor, Eriksen and Stapelkamp, p. 13).

9. Darling, Sudden Collapses in Public Places, p. 9.10. Darling, Sudden Collapses in Public Places, p. 10.11. The poem implicitly alludes to the potentially long waiting times involved

with treatment on the UK’s overstretched National Health Service.12. Darling, Sudden Collapses in Public Places, p. 14.13. Darling, Sudden Collapses in Public Places, p. 15.14. Darling, Sudden Collapses in Public Places, p. 16.15. Darling, Sudden Collapses in Public Places, pp. 16–17.16. Darling, Sudden Collapses in Public Places, p. 50.17. Darling, Sudden Collapses in Public Places, p. 41.18. The euphemistic aspect of Darling’s title is echoed in the language of UK

newspaper obituary columns, where it may be conventional not to name cancer, but to write of ‘a long illness’ or ‘a brief illness’.

19. Julia Darling, Apology for Absence (Todmorden: Arc Publications, 2004), p. 36.20. Lifshitz, p. xiv.21. A 2012 study of cancer incidence in the United States shows that ‘despite

having lower incidence rates, black women had a 41% higher breast cancer death rate. More black women were diagnosed at regional or distant can-cer stage compared with white women (45% versus 35%). For every 100 breast cancers diagnosed, black women had nine more deaths than white women (27 deaths per 100 breast cancers diagnosed among black women compared with 18 per 100 among white women)’ (Kathleen A. Cronin et al., ‘Vital Signs: Racial Disparities in Breast Cancer Severity – United States, 2005–2009’, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, vol. 61, no. 45 (2012), pp. 922–6, at p. 922, http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6145a5.htm?s_cid=mm6145a5_w).

22. Lorde, The Cancer Journals, p. 14.23. Lorde, The Cancer Journals, p. 53.24. Lorde, The Cancer Journals, pp. 61–2.25. Lorde, The Cancer Journals, p. 14.26. Adrienne Rich, The Fact of a Doorframe (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), p. 255.27. Audre Lorde, Collected Poems (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), p. 456.28. Lorde, Collected Poems, p. 461.29. According to the United States National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance,

Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database, the five-year survival rates for localized, regional and metastasized breast cancer in the period 2002–08 were 98.4 per cent, 83.9 per cent and 23.8 per cent respectively (http://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/breast.html, accessed 18 December 2012).


30. Lorde, Collected Poems, p. 461.31. Lorde, Collected Poems, p. 462.32. Lorde, Collected Poems, pp. 472–3.33. According to Ann E. Reuman, in The Concise Oxford Companion to African

American Literature, ed. William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster and Trudier Harris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 66.

34. Alicia Suskin Ostriker, The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968–1998 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), p. 202.

35. Ostriker, The Little Space, p. 206.36. Ostriker, The Little Space, p. 203.37. Ostriker’s poem may owe something to the Irish poet Thomas Dermody

(1775–1802), whose ‘The Simile’ gives a long description of a mysterious object, beginning, ‘’Tis like a hat without a head, / ’Tis like a house without a shed, / ’Tis like a gun without a lock, / ’Tis like a swain without a flock’; it ends with the declaration, ‘In short, at once to stop my mouthing, / ’Tis like – what is it like? – like nothing’ (Thomas Dermody, ‘The Simile’, in The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry, ed. Patrick Crotty (London: Penguin, 2010), p. 358).

38. Ostriker, The Little Space, pp. 204–5.39. Ostriker, The Little Space, p. 210.40. Ostriker, The Little Space, p. 211.41. Ostriker, The Little Space, p. 209.42. Ostriker, The Little Space, p. 212.43. Ostriker, The Little Space, p. 211.44. Ostriker’s prose work on breast cancer, ‘Scenes from a Mastectomy’, develops

her thinking on the responsibility of metaphor in relation to this disease, and particularly the trope of cancer and conflict in relation to the first Gulf War (Ostriker, ‘Scenes from a Mastectomy’ (1999), in Raz, pp. 175–200).

45. Marilyn Hacker, Winter Numbers (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), p. 11.46. Tennyson, In Memoriam, Prologue, p. 5; Milton, p. 50; Percy Bysshe Shelley,

The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press, 2003), p. 531.

47. Hacker, Winter Numbers, p. 14.48. Hacker, ‘Journal Entries’ (July 1995), in Raz, pp. 201–41, at p. 210.49. Kennedy, pp. 77–8.50. Hacker, Winter Numbers, p. 76.51. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1975), pp. 171–2.52. Hacker, Winter Numbers, p. 81.53. It seems Hacker has World War One particularly in mind; the effect would

be quite different if she had alluded to ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ rather than shell shock.

54. The WHO records that 7.9 million people died of cancer in 2007. The num-ber is expected to increase to 11.5 million in 2030 (http://www.who.int/features/qa/15/en/index.html, accessed 18 December 2012).

55. Hacker, Winter Numbers, p. 85.56. Hacker, Winter Numbers, p. 83.57. Hacker, Winter Numbers, p. 85.58. Stephanie Hartman, ‘Reading the Scar in Breast Cancer Poetry’, Feminist

Studies, vol. 30, no. 1 (2004), pp. 155–77, at p. 165.


59. Hacker, Winter Numbers, p. 90.60. Kennedy, p. 78.61. Kathy Acker, ‘The Gift of Disease’, Guardian (8 January 1997).62. Hacker, Winter Numbers, p. 87.63. Hacker, Winter Numbers, p. 90.64. Hacker, Winter Numbers, p. 89.65. Hacker, Winter Numbers, p. 95.66. Saba Bahar, ‘“If I’m One of the Victims, Who Survives?”: Marilyn Hacker’s

Breast Cancer Texts’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 28, no. 4 (2003), pp. 1025–52, at p. 1040.

4 Surviving Cancer

1. Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poems (London: Penguin, 2005), p. 217. 2. Kavanagh, p. 227. 3. Kavanagh’s memorial is self-consciously less grandiose or heroic than that of

W. B. Yeats, who is given a playful dig in the final word, ‘passer-by’; this ech-oes the last words ‘cut’ into the limestone headstone by the poet’s ‘command’ at the end of ‘Under Ben Bulben’, and the instruction to ‘Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by!’ (Yeats, The Collected Poems, p. 328).

4. Sarah Crown, interview with Jo Shapcott, Guardian (24 July 2010), http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/24/jo-shapcott-poet-interview, accessed 18 December 2012.

5. Crown interview. 6. Crown interview. 7. Jo Shapcott, Of Mutability (London: Faber & Faber, 2010), p. 3. 8. Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill [1930] (Ashfield: Paris Press, 2002), pp. 12–13. 9. Woolf, p. 21.10. Kira Cochrane, ‘Jo Shapcott: the book of life’, Guardian (27 January 2011),

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jan/27/jo-shapcott-poetry-costa, accessed 18 December 2012.

11. Shapcott, p. 4.12. Shapcott, p. 5.13. Shapcott, p. 6.14. Sinclair McKay, interview with Jo Shapcott, Daily Telegraph (27 January 2012),

http://telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/8286254/Jo-Shapcott-a-page-in-the-life.html, accessed 18 December 2012.

15. Shapcott, p. 7.16. Shapcott, p. 8.17. Yeats, The Collected Poems, p. 296.18. Shapcott, p. 13.19. Shapcott, p. 44.20. Shapcott, p. 52.21. Shapcott, p. 53.22. Woolf, pp. 6–7.23. Christopher Reid, The Song of Lunch (London: Faber & Faber, 2009), p. 32.24. Shapcott, p. 54.25. Rae Armantrout, ‘A cancer patient addresses doctors’, part 1 (6

November 2011), http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/11/


rae-armantrout-what-is-it-like-then-to-be-told-that-you-have-adrenal-cor-tical-cancer-a-disease-so-rare-you-have-never-heard-of-it-and-from-which-you-will-probably-die/, accessed 18 December 2012.

26. See Emily Dickinson’s poem ‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes —’, in Ferguson et al., p. 1015.

27. Rae Armantrout, Versed (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2009), pp. 56–7.

28. Armantrout, Versed, p. 57.29. Armantrout, ‘A cancer patient addresses doctors’, part 2.30. Armantrout, Versed, p. 58.31. Armantrout, Versed, p. 59.32. Armantrout, ‘A cancer patient addresses doctors’, part 3.33. Armantrout, Versed, p. 62.34. Armantrout, Versed, p. 64.35. Armantrout, Versed, pp. 117–18.36. Armantrout, Versed, p. 85.37. Armantrout, Versed, p. 86.38. Armantrout, Versed, p. 107.39. This is the central thesis of Richard Dawkins’ seminal work, The Selfish Gene

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).40. Armantrout, Versed, p. 121.41. Christian Wiman, ‘Gazing into the Abyss’, Ambition and Survival (2007),

http://theamericanscholar.org/gazing-into-the-abyss/, accessed 18 December 2012.

42. Christian Wiman, Every Riven Thing (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010), p. 5.

43. Wiman, Every Riven Thing, p. 6.44. This is to follow the common Western artistic representation of the tree of

knowledge as an apple tree. The species of the tree is not stated in Genesis.45. Wiman, Every Riven Thing, p. 19.46. Wiman, Every Riven Thing, pp. 20–1.47. Wiman, Every Riven Thing, p. 21.48. Wiman, ‘Gazing into the Abyss’.49. Wiman, ‘Gazing into the Abyss’.50. Wiman, Every Riven Thing, p. 22.51. Wiman, Every Riven Thing, p. 23.52. Wiman, Every Riven Thing, p. 70.53. Wiman, Every Riven Thing, p. 71.54. Wiman, ‘Gazing into the Abyss’.55. Tennyson, In Memoriam, xlviii, p. 37.56. Kavanagh, p. 224.

5 Terminal Words: Conversing with Cancer

1. Hitchens, pp. 47–8. The original Vanity Fair article was titled ‘Unspoken Truths’.

2. His work was published as the short book Mortality, a collection of articles and fragments.


3. Philip Hodgins, Selected Poems (North Ryde: Angus & Robertson, 1997), p. 30. In his pseudo-autobiography It’s Not About the Bike, Lance Armstrong has a chapter titled ‘Conversations with Cancer’, in which he decides to argue with his disease, to treat it as an equal opponent (Armstrong, pp. 97–125).

4. Edson, pp. 43–4. 5. Yeats, The Collected Poems, p. 142. 6. Patricia Jasen, ‘From the “Silent Killer” to the “Whispering Disease”: Ovarian

Cancer and the Uses of Metaphor’, Medical History, vol. 53, no. 4 (2009), pp. 489–512, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2766137/, accessed 18 December 2012.

7. James, p. 25. 8. Kathleen Jamie’s 2012 essay ‘Pathologies’ describes the landscapes that open

up when the human body is examined microscopically. Jamie describes, for instance, a view of the stomach bacteria Helicobacter pylori as musk oxen in a valley, and the doctor guiding her comments on the way they appear to be grazing (Kathleen Jamie, ‘Pathologies’, Sightlines (London: Sort Of Books, 2012), pp. 21–41, at p. 34).

9. Morgan, p. 56.10. Morgan, p. 57.11. Beau’s view of socialism is echoed at the end of Morgan’s ‘Brothers and

Sisters’: ‘There will never be a paradise with people like angels / Walking and singing through forests of music, / But let us have the decency of a society / That helps those who cannot help themselves. / It can be done; it must be done; so do it’ (Morgan, p. 71).

12. Morgan, p. 58.13. In The English Elegy, Peter Sacks related how in the 20th century, ‘Sociologists

and psychologists, as well as literary and cultural historians’ demonstrated how death could seem ‘stupefyingly colossal in cases of large-scale war or genocide’; but it seems reasonable to suggest that mourning is always expe-rienced in personal terms (Sacks, p. 299).

14. Morgan, p. 59.15. Morgan, p. 60.16. Morgan, p. 61.17. Morgan, p. 61.18. Morgan, p. 62.19. Morgan, p. 63.20. Morgan, p. 64.21. For a thoughtful discussion of the similarities between the abject conditions

of pregnancy and cancer, see Stacey, pp. 89–96.22. Hodgins said this of having leukaemia: ‘That was probably the worst aspect

of being an only child, finding myself in a situation like that, I felt bad about it and sorry for them, that I was an only child, because if I died from the disease then they’ve lost their family, as it were. It’s a responsibility’ (Diana Ritch, ‘An Interview with Philip Hodgins’ (7 March 1988). Transcript, 16pp. (53 mins), National Library of Australia. Tape No. TRC 2350, p. 5).

23. Hodgins published five collections of poetry, one posthumous, and won a number of literary awards, including the National Book Council Poetry Prize.

24. This collection was awarded the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry in 1987.


25. Geoff Page, A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Australian Poetry (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1995), pp. 124–5.

26. Ritch, p. 11.27. Interview with Barbara Williams, In Other Words: Interviews with Australian

Poets, ed. Barbara Williams (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), pp. 60–71, at p. 62.28. Hodgins, Selected Poems, p. 4. At the time of writing, Hodgins’s collections

are out of print, but his archive is available online, at the Australian Poetry Library (http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/hodgins-philip/poems).

29. Hodgins, Selected Poems, p. 37.30. Hodgins, Selected Poems, p. 42.31. Hodgins, Selected Poems, p. 7.32. Hodgins, Selected Poems, p. 9.33. Hodgins, Selected Poems, p. 30.34. Hodgins, Selected Poems, p. 31.35. Werner Senn, ‘Voicing the Body: The Cancer Poems of Philip Hodgins’,

Bodies and Voices: The Force-Field of Representation and Discourse in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, ed. Merete Falck Borch, Eva Rask Knudsen, Martin Leer and Bruce Clunies Ross (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), pp. 237–50, at p. 242.

36. Sontag, p. 20.37. Hodgins, Selected Poems, p. 38.38. Hodgins, Selected Poems, p. 63.39. Sontag, p. 87.40. Hodgins, Selected Poems, pp. 60–1.41. Hodgins, Selected Poems, p. 61.42. Janet Chimonyo, ‘A Conversation with Philip Hodgins’, Antipodes, vol. 8,

no. 1 (1994), pp. 63–4, at p. 64. To Barbara Williams in 1988, Hodgins said that ‘it’s a cliché to say it’s a form of therapy, catharsis; but it’s true’ (Williams, p. 62).

43. Hodgins, Selected Poems, p. 41.44. Ritch, p. 8.45. Hodgins, Selected Poems, p. 10.46. Hodgins, Selected Poems, pp. 310–11.47. Chimonyo, p. 64.48. Hodgins, Selected Poems, pp. 314–15.49. Hodgins, Selected Poems, p. 315.50. Senn, in Borch, p. 242.51. Hodgins, Selected Poems, p. 318.52. Hodgins, Selected Poems, p. 17.53. Hodgins, Selected Poems, p. 28.54. Peter Boyle, ‘Doggerel and Grace: Australian Poetry in the Mid-’90s’, Cordite:

Poetry and Poetics Review, vol. 1 (1997), pp. 2–11, http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/14234/20010621/cordite.org.au/back-issues/cordite_01.pdf, accessed 18 December 2012.

55. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 51.

56. Scarry, p. 4.57. Paul Muldoon’s ‘Incantata’, for instance, is a mouth howling for 360 lines.

The poet’s grief, the dead woman’s cancer cells, and her accompanying pain, replicate together.


58. The sound of pain would seem to be fundamentally social: it is precisely because pain communicates so well that splitting, self-deception or some kind of dehumanization has to occur for a torturer to be able to torture.

59. Ritch, p. 15.60. Peter Goldsworthy, ‘The Biology of Poetry’, Five Bells, vol. 10, no. 1

(2002), pp. 22–6, http://www.poetsunion.com/jwlecture/2002, accessed 18 December 2012.

61. Clive James, ‘The Meaning of Recognition’, Australian Book Review, no. 254 (2003), pp. 21–9, http://www.clivejames.com/lectures/recognition, accessed 18 December 2012.

62. Hitchens, p. 55.

6 Paul Muldoon: Cancer and the Ethics of Representation

1. Paul Muldoon, ‘How to Peel a Poem: Five Poets Dine out on Verse’, Harper’s Magazine (September 1999), pp. 45–60, at p. 46.

2. Muldoon, Poems 1968–1998, pp. 110–11. 3. Muldoon, The Annals of Chile, p. 188. 4. Muldoon, ‘Between Ireland and Montevideo’, in McDonald, Mistaken

Identities, p. 176. 5. Ramazani, p. xi. See also Sandra M. Gilbert, ‘“Rats’ Alley”: The Great War,

Modernism, and the (Anti) Pastoral Elegy’, New Literary History, vol. 30 (1999), pp. 179–201.

6. Dunn, Elegies, p. 62. 7. In ‘Incantata’, this variation serves the tension between agency and predesti-

nation. Whatever direction a line takes, it arrives at a predetermined destina-tion, just as the elegy seems to move towards the possibility of consolation it is predetermined not to find; as another aspect of regret, the structure simultaneously offers the possibility of avoiding fate while affirming it.

8. Other correspondences: lines 1 and 12, and lines 3, 6 and 14 of sonnet 2 rhyme with lines 3, 6 and 14, and lines 1 and 12 of sonnet 18. This second pattern of correspondence is shared by sonnets 3 and 17, 4 and 16, 5 and 15, 7 and 13, and 9 and 11. Lines 1 and 12 of sonnet 6 rhyme with lines 3, 6 and 14 of sonnet 14. Sonnets 8 and 12 use the same kind of rhyme words in exactly the same order. Lines 1 and 12, lines 3, 6 and 14, and lines 8 and 9 of sonnet 10 rhyme with lines 3 and 14, 1 and 12, and 8 and 9 of sonnets 6, 14 and 16 respectively.

9. Muldoon, Horse Latitudes, p. 6.10. Muldoon, Horse Latitudes, p. 17.11. Muldoon, Horse Latitudes, p. 20.12. Fran Brearton, review of Horse Latitudes by Paul Muldoon, http://www.tow-

erpoetry.org.uk/reviews/reviews-archive/189-fran-brearton-reviews-horse-latitudes-by-paul-muldoon, accessed 18 December 2012.

13. Muldoon, Horse Latitudes, p. 3.14. Muldoon, Horse Latitudes, p. 4.15. Muldoon, Horse Latitudes, p. 7.16. Paul Muldoon, Moy Sand and Gravel (London: Faber & Faber, 2002), p. 67.


17. Sontag, p. 20.18. Sontag, p. 87.19. Sontag, p. 64.20. Sontag, p. 82, p. 85.21. Sontag’s criticism stems from a conflation of ‘destructive’ and ‘evil’.

Something can be destructive without being evil. Additionally, cancer suffer-ers may not think of the disease as part of the self, but something that has somehow entered from outside, something that they also consider in very negative ways, and want to be extracted as soon as possible.

22. Jasen. Jasen traces how the dominant metaphor for ovarian cancer, the ‘silent killer’, came to be rivalled by the image of a ‘whispering’ disease, something non-fatal if the symptoms could be recognized in time.

23. John Redmond, ‘Interview with Paul Muldoon’, Thumbscrew, vol. 4 (1996), pp. 2–18, at p. 2.

24. Muldoon, Horse Latitudes, p. 9.25. Muldoon, Horse Latitudes, p. 26.26. Peter McDonald, ‘Horse Latitudes’, review of Horse Latitudes by Paul

Muldoon, Poetry Review, vol. 97, no. 1 (2007), pp. 88–90, at p. 89.27. Muldoon, Horse Latitudes, p. 9.28. Paul Muldoon, ‘Getting Round: Notes Towards an Ars Poetica’, Essays in

Criticism, vol. 48, no. 2 (1998), pp. 107–28, at p. 125.29. Muldoon, Horse Latitudes, p. 21.30. Sontag, p. 93.31. McDonald, Horse Latitudes review, p. 89.32. Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark (London: Penguin, 1974), p. 41.33. Carroll, p. 60.34. Carroll, p. 64.35. Carroll, p. 94.36. Carroll, p. 96.37. Muldoon, Horse Latitudes, p. 94.38. Ovarian cancer, which killed both Muldoon’s mother and sister, has around

a 10 per cent rate of heritability: http://www.ovariancancer.jhmi.edu/heredi-tary.cfm, accessed 18 December 2012.

39. See William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, 2:1:15–25.40. John Donne, The Complete English Poems (London: Everyman, 1991), p. 59.41. Maria Johnston, ‘Tracing the Root of Metastasis’, review of Horse Latitudes by

Paul Muldoon, Contemporary Poetry Review, http://www.cprw.com/Johnston/muldoon.htm, accessed 18 December 2012.

42. Muldoon, Horse Latitudes, p. 78.43. Muldoon, Horse Latitudes, p. 81.44. In ‘Kaddish’, Allen Ginsberg wrote about his mother’s diarrhoea and other

problems not in order to humiliate, but to show how she was humili-ated by illness. For Ginsberg, repeatedly asserting the abject was a form of incantation, summoning faith that the worst aspects of existence could be overcome.

45. Muldoon, Horse Latitudes, p. 80.46. ‘All that happens is as habitual and familiar as roses in spring and fruit in

the summer. True too of disease, death, defamation, and conspiracy – and all that delights or gives pain to fools’ (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations IV: 44, trans. Martin Hammond (London: Penguin, 2006), p. 31).


47. Nicholas Wroe, ‘Invisible threads’, interview with Paul Muldoon, Guardian (24 March 2007), http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/mar/24/features-reviews.guardianreview12, accessed 18 December 2012.

48. Seamus Heaney, The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures (London: Faber & Faber, 1995), p. 1.

49. Muldoon, The Annals of Chile, p. 19.50. Steven Matthews, ‘Muldoon’s New Poems and Lyrics’, Poetry Review, vol. 97,

no. 1 (2007), pp. 90–2, at p. 92.51. In ‘Reading Pascal in the Lowlands’, Douglas Dunn, mourning his wife,

recalls a conversation with the father of a boy with leukaemia: ‘I have said / I am sorry. What more is there to say?’ (Dunn, Elegies, p. 46).

7 Fierce Verse: Cancer and Imaginative Redress

1. Peter Reading, Collected Poems 1: Poems 1970–1984 (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1995), p. 305.

2. M. Wynn Thomas, review of A Hospital Odyssey by Gwyneth Lewis (17 April 2010), http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/apr/17/hospital-odyssey-gwyneth-lewis-poetry, accessed 18 December 2012.

3. Hitchens, p. 7. 4. Hitchens, p. 91. 5. In Edson’s W;t, during her extremely harsh course of chemotherapy, Vivian

observes that ‘I am not in isolation because I have cancer, because I have a tumor the size of a grapefruit. No. I am in isolation because I am being treated for cancer. My treatment imperils my health’ (Edson, p. 47).

6. Lakoff and Johnson, p. 5. 7. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge,

1993), p. 150. 8. Lakoff and Johnson, pp. 211–12. 9. The confrontation metaphor is inaccurate on three levels: in its severity

(cancer is more powerful than a fight, less immediately lethal than a battle); in its falsity (cancer treatment is not purely active); and in its restriction of independent thinking. While it declares an attempt to constrain the disease, the battle metaphor only constrains the imaginative will.

10. Stacey, pp. 63–4.11. Martha Stoddard Holmes, ‘After Sontag: Reclaiming Metaphor’, Genre, vol. 44,

no. 3 (2011), p. 270.12. Gwyneth Lewis, A Hospital Odyssey (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 2010), p. 8.13. Lewis, A Hospital Odyssey, p. 13.14. Lewis, A Hospital Odyssey, p. 10.15. Lewis, A Hospital Odyssey, p. 8.16. Lewis, A Hospital Odyssey, p. 15.17. Lewis, A Hospital Odyssey, p. 16.18. Cynthia Haven, ‘Welsh Poet at Stanford: Small Languages Make a Big

Difference’, Stanford Report (7 January 2010), http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/january4/gwyneth-lewis-qanda-010810.html, accessed 18 December 2012.

19. Lewis, A Hospital Odyssey, p. 18.20. Lewis, A Hospital Odyssey, p. 23.


21. Lewis, A Hospital Odyssey, p. 30.22. Lewis, A Hospital Odyssey, p. 35.23. Lewis, A Hospital Odyssey, p. 37.24. Lewis, A Hospital Odyssey, p. 56.25. Lewis, A Hospital Odyssey, p. 44.26. Lewis, A Hospital Odyssey, p. 68.27. Lewis, A Hospital Odyssey, p. 81.28. Lewis, A Hospital Odyssey, p. 84.29. Lewis, A Hospital Odyssey, p. 88.30. Lewis, A Hospital Odyssey, p. 90.31. Lewis, A Hospital Odyssey, pp. 93–4.32. Lewis, A Hospital Odyssey, p. 99.33. Lewis, A Hospital Odyssey, p. 102.34. Lewis, A Hospital Odyssey, p. 104.35. Lewis, A Hospital Odyssey, p. 106.36. Lewis, A Hospital Odyssey, p. 119.37. Lewis, A Hospital Odyssey, p. 131.38. Lewis, A Hospital Odyssey, p. 124.39. Lewis, A Hospital Odyssey, p. 139.40. Lewis, A Hospital Odyssey, p. 130.41. Lewis, A Hospital Odyssey, p. 140.42. Lewis, A Hospital Odyssey, pp. 145–6.43. Lewis, A Hospital Odyssey, p. 146.44. Lewis, A Hospital Odyssey, p. 150.45. Lewis, A Hospital Odyssey, p. 152, p. 155.46. Lewis, A Hospital Odyssey, p. 155.47. Lewis, A Hospital Odyssey, p. 156.48. Lewis, A Hospital Odyssey, p. 117.49. At the time of writing, Professor Claire Lewis at the University of Sheffield

was heading a team working on this research. Claire E. Lewis et al., ‘Macrophage Delivery of an Oncolytic Virus Abolishes Tumor Regrowth and Metastasis After Chemotherapy or Irradiation’, Cancer Research, vol. 73, no. 2 (2013), pp. 490–5. Published online 20 November 2012, http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/early/2012/11/21/0008-5472.CAN-12-3056

50. Tests had been successful with prostate cancer in mice, with the possibility of human trials in 2013 (James Gallagher, ‘Trojan-horse therapy “completely eliminates” cancer in mice’, BBC News (21 December 2012), http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-20795977, accessed 21 December 2012).

51. Thomas, review of A Hospital Odyssey.52. Tony Harrison, Laureate’s Block and Other Poems (London: Penguin, 2000),

p. 36.53. Harrison, p. 37.54. At the time Harrison was writing the poem, Marimastat was being clinically

trialled. It performed badly, so its development was discontinued.55. Harrison, p. 38.56. Harrison, pp. 39–40.57. Harrison, p. 41.58. Harrison, p. 43.


59. Jacques Derrida, Memoires: for Paul de Man, rev. edn, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, Eduardo Cadava and Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 29.

60. Harrison, pp. 43–4.61. Harrison, p. 44.62. The cover of the 1994 Farrar, Straus & Giroux paperback edition of The

Annals of Chile showed a series of potato prints Muldoon had made.63. Donne, p. 59. Muldoon quoted this poem in ‘Sillyhow Stride’, his elegy for

Warren Zevon, in Horse Latitudes.64. Muldoon, The Annals of Chile, p. 13.65. Muldoon, ‘The Point of Poetry’, Princeton University Library Chronicle, vol. 59,

no. 3 (1998), pp. 503–16, at p. 505.66. ‘The Art of Poetry No. 87’, interview with James S. F. Wilson, Paris Review, no.

169 (2004), http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/30/the-art-of-poetry-no-87-paul-muldoon, accessed 18 December 2012.

67. Muldoon, The Annals of Chile, p. 20.68. Muldoon has described being not so much the person by whom a poem

was written, but ‘the person through whom a poem was written’ (Muldoon, Poems 1968–1998, p. xv).

69. Muldoon, The Annals of Chile, p. 20.70. Muldoon, The Annals of Chile, pp. 27–8.71. W. B. Yeats, letter to Olivia Shakespear (October 1927), The Letters of W. B.

Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954), p. 730.72. Paul Muldoon, Maggot (London: Faber & Faber, 2010), p. 27.73. Unprotected vaginal sex and unprotected anal sex involve the risk of human

papillomavirus (HPV) transmission, a virus that can cause cancers, including cervical, vaginal and anal cancer.

74. Muldoon, Maggot, p. 29.75. Muldoon, Maggot, p. 32.76. Muldoon, Maggot, p. 33.77. Jefferson Holdridge, ‘Festering Ideas: Paul Muldoon’s Maggot’, Irish Studies

Review, vol. 19, no. 3 (2011), pp. 341–51, at p. 343.78. Muldoon, Maggot, p. 81.79. Muldoon, Maggot, p. 82.80. Muldoon, Maggot, p. 84.81. Muldoon, Maggot, p. 85.82. Muldoon, Maggot, p. 18.83. Niall Mac Coitir, Ireland’s Animals: Myths, Legends & Folklore (Wilton: The

Collins Press, 2010), p. 157. The brown hare was introduced from Britain, where it was introduced from mainland Europe, where it was introduced from the Middle East and Asia.

84. At the time of writing, hare coursing is legal in Ireland, but suspended in Northern Ireland, in the interest of conservation.

85. Muldoon, Maggot, p. 19.86. Sigmund Freud’s phrase for this phenomenon in Civilization and Its

Discontents (1930) is ‘the narcissism of minor differences’ (The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. XXI, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 114). Freud used the term in his earlier


works ‘The Taboo of Virginity’ (1918) and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) (Standard Edition, vol. XI, p. 199, and vol. XVIII, p. 101).

87. Muldoon, Maggot, p. 21.88. Thornycroft’s statue was commissioned by a German, Prince Albert.89. Muldoon, Maggot, p. 22.90. In all the ‘never’s, for instance, there is possibly an ironic overtone of Ian

Paisley’s speech rejecting the Anglo-Irish Agreement signed by Margaret Thatcher and Garret FitzGerald on 15 November 1985. Unionists opposed the Agreement because it gave the Republic a role in the governing of Northern Ireland. On 23 November 1985, at a mass rally outside Belfast City Hall, the DUP leader asked, ‘Where do the terrorists operate from? From the Irish Republic! That’s where they come from! Where do the terrorists return to for sanctuary? To the Irish Republic! And yet Mrs Thatcher tells us that that Republic must have some say in our Province. We say never, never, never, never!’

91. Muldoon, Maggot, p. 20.92. Auden, p. 89.93. Auden, p. 97.

8 Remission

1. Muldoon, Maggot, p. 19. 2. I am grateful to Matthew Campbell for spotting this pattern. 3. Redmond, ‘Interview with Paul Muldoon’, p. 4. 4. Jamie, Sightlines, p. 32. 5. Jamie, p. 30. 6. Jamie, p. 31. 7. Brigid Collins and Kathleen Jamie, Frissure (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2013), p. vi. 8. Robert Burns, Selected Poems, ed. Don Paterson (London: Faber & Faber,

2001), p. 80. 9. Collins and Jamie, p. 4.10. Collins and Jamie, p. 7.11. Collins and Jamie, p. 31.12. In ‘Life Boat’, the Irish poet Dorothy Molloy imagines her skull as an ark full

of cancerous, mythical beasts trying to kill her; on top of Ararat, she can do nothing but wait for the waters to relent – ‘For forty days or weeks or months or years’ – until she can be led out of the vessel, to ‘a spirit-lamp, safe passage to the cedar-groves of Lebanon’ (Dorothy Molloy, Gethsemane Day (London: Faber & Faber, 2006), pp. 47–8). The poem holds to a frail hope of recovery, among the strong cedars, north of the Garden of Gethsemane and the inevi-table sacrifice alluded to in the collection’s title. Dorothy Molloy died of liver cancer in 2004.

13. Martin Malone, ‘Like I Was Your Girlfriend’, Magma, vol. 56 (2013), p. 44.14. Ciaran Carson, On the Night Watch (Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University

Press, 2010), p. 109.15. Carson, On the Night Watch, p. 124.16. Carson, Until Before After (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2010), p. 82.17. Carson, Until Before After, p. 21.


18. ‘Leaning into’, ‘We see’ and ‘The more’ (Carson, Until Before After, p. 20, p. 21, p. 40).

19. ‘The calculus’, ‘Repeatedly’, ‘So is’, ‘Is abacus’, ‘What is’, ‘So far’, and ‘What is’ (Carson, Until Before After, p. 23, p. 25, p. 83, p. 100, p. 101, p. 113, p. 114).

20. ‘Repeatedly’, ‘Not until’, ‘When it struck’, ‘As if’, ‘Some’, ‘One cannot’, ‘I looked through’ and ‘That I might know’ (Carson, Until Before After, p. 25, p. 36, p. 56, p. 60, p. 78, p. 95, p. 99, p. 111).

21. ‘So it is’, ‘The hinge’, ‘The hinge as hinges’, ‘At death’s door’, ‘Backtracking on’, ‘Through swing’ and ‘I open the door’ (Carson, Until Before After, p. 14, p. 31, p. 32, p. 35, p. 67, p. 94, p. 119).

22. ‘What does it say’, ‘But open’, ‘It’s one of those’, ‘The next tune’, ‘The turn’, ‘The tune’, ‘Teaching me it’, ‘Year after year’ and ‘You only’ (Carson, Until Before After, p. 68, p. 69, p. 105, p. 109, p. 115, p. 116, p. 117, p. 118, p. 118).

23. Carson, Until Before After, p. 25.24. Carson, Until Before After, p. 46.25. Carson, Until Before After, p. 73.26. Carson, Until Before After, p. 75.27. Carson, Until Before After, p. 88.28. Carson, Until Before After, p. 117.29. Carson, Until Before After, p. 119.30. Jamie, p. 21.31. Larkin, p. 208.

222

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228

Acker, Kathy 98Adcock, Fleur 23–5adrenal cortical cancer 110AIDS 15, 93apoptosis 8, 32, 200n, 206nArmantrout, Rae 102, 109–15, 122

‘A cancer patient addresses doctors’ 109–12

Versed 109–15‘Apartment’ 114–15‘Fact’ 115, 122‘Later’ 110–11‘Own’ 111–12‘Pass’ 113 ‘The Racket’ 113–14‘Together’ 112–13‘Translation’ 113

Armstrong, Lance 10, 12, 213nArnold, Matthew 3Auden, W. H. 17–19, 188

Bahar, Saba 99Beckett, Samuel 177Bennett, Arnold 199nBevan, Aneurin 169Bidart, Frank 22–3Blake, William 129Bor, Robert 13, 209nBoyle, Peter 141breast cancer 5, 8–9, 10, 14–15, 24,

40, 64–9, 79–100, 102–9, 191–3, 209n, 210n

Burns, Robert 192

Campbell, Matthew 220ncancer risk factors 2, 5, 20, 86, 199n,

200n, 219ncarcinogenesis 5–6, 20, 86, 200nCarroll, Lewis 154–6Carson, Ciaran 194–8

On the Night Watch 194‘Behind the Screen’ 194‘On Looking Through’ 194

Until Before After 194–8‘Centimetres’ 196‘Homecoming’ 196‘I open the door’ 197–8‘In the Book of Nod’ 195‘In the lift’ 196‘Repeatedly’ 195–6‘Teaching me it’ 196–7‘They said’ 196‘We see’ 195

Cassius Dio 186chemotherapy 7–9, 11, 13, 41, 64,

79, 83–4, 87, 94, 96, 99, 102, 107, 114, 118, 120, 135, 137, 143, 148, 160, 164, 169, 171, 173–4, 181, 201n, 217n

Clifton, Lucille 80Collins, Brigid 191colorectal cancer 28, 182

Darling, Julia 16, 81–4, 85, 93, 100

Apology for Absence 84‘Nurses’ 84

Sudden Collapses in Public Places 81‘A Waiting Room in August’ 82‘Chemotherapy’ 83‘High Maintenance’ 81–2‘Out of Here’ 83‘Too Heavy’ 16, 82–3

Davison, Peter 21–2Dawkins, Richard 212nDermody, Thomas 210nDerrida, Jacques 58, 62,

174Desmarais, Jane 13Diamond, John 16–17Dickey, James 20Dickinson, Emily 110, 212nDiedrich, Lisa 10Donne, John 157, 175, 219nDonoghue, Denis 16

Index

Index 229

Dunn, Douglas 27–8, 47–53, 146Elegies 27, 47, 52, 146

‘A Summer Night’ 52–3‘Anniversaries’ 51–2, 146‘Arrangements’ 49‘At the Edge of a Birchwood’ 49–51‘Birch Room’ 49‘Creatures’ 48–50‘December’ 49‘Home Again’ 50–1‘Leaving Dundee’ 52‘Reading Pascal in the Lowlands’

49–50, 217n‘Second Opinion’ 48–9‘The Butterfly House’ 48, 50–1

dyskaryosis 7

eclogue 54–6, 126, 129–30Edson, Margaret 124–5, 202n, 217nEhrenreich, Barbara 8–9, 15–16Empson, William 34Eriksen, Carina 209n

Franks, Leonard M. 4, 6, 8Freud, Sigmund 32–3, 54–6, 204n,

219n, 220nFussell, Paul 95

Gilbert, Sandra M. 145Ginsberg, Allen 216nGoldie, Lawrence 13

Hacker, Marilyn 93–100‘Journal Entries’ 94Winter Numbers 93–4, 97–8, 100

‘Against Elegies’ 93–4‘August Journal’ 99–100‘Cancer Winter’ 94–100‘Year’s End’ 94–5

Hall, Donald 11, 28–40, 44–7, 51–2, 203nThe Painted Bed 29, 35–6, 39–40, 45,

203n‘Affirmation’ 39–40‘Burn the Album’ 38‘Her Garden’ 37‘Kill the Day’ 36–7‘The Wish’ 37–8

Without 29–30, 32, 33, 203n

‘“A Beard for a Blue Pantry”’ 30, 35‘Air Shatters in the Car’s Small

Room’ 31–2‘Her Long Illness’ 29–30, 35‘Last Days’ 32‘Letter at Christmas’ 33‘Letter in Autumn’ 34–5‘Letter in the New Year’ 33‘Midsummer Letter’ 32–3‘Postcard: January 22nd’ 34‘The Porcelain Couple’ 31‘Weeds and Peonies’ 35, 45

Hanahan, Douglas 6, 200nHardy, Thomas 37Harrison, Tony 172–5, 182, 188, 218n

Laureate’s Block and Other Poems 172‘Four Poems for Jonathan Silver

in His Sickness’ 172–5Hartman, Stephanie 97Heaney, Seamus 145Hitchens, Christopher 16–17, 124,

143, 163–4, 205n, 206nHodgins, Philip 124–5, 130–43, 213n

Animal Warmth 137, 143Blood and Bone 130, 132, 135

‘A Bit of Bitterness’ 132‘Apologies’ 132‘Catharsis’ 138–9‘Death Who’ 124, 133–4‘Ich Bin Allein’ 134–5‘Leaving Hospital’ 133‘Question Time’ 140‘Room I Ward 10 West 12/11/83’

131–2‘Room I Ward 10 West 23/11/83’

132–3‘The Change’ 141–2‘Trip Cancelled’ 137

Dispossessed 143Down the Lake with Half a Chook 135

‘Leeches’ 136–7, 140‘The Effect’ 135–6

Things Happen 137, 139–41‘Blood Connexions’ 138–40‘Cytotoxic Rigor’ 140‘The Sick Poem’ 139–40

Up on All Fours 137, 143Holdridge, Jefferson 182

230 Index

Holmes, Martha Stoddard 165Homer 128, 169, 171Horace 37

Ignatieff, Michael 76–7

James, Clive 143James, Nicholas 4–5, 7, 79, 129, 200nJamie, Kathleen 190–3, 198, 213n

Frissure 191–3‘Pathologies’ 190–1, 213n

Jasen, Patricia 125, 150, 216nJohnson, Mark 15, 164Johnston, Maria 157Jonson, Ben 3Joyce, James 77, 177

Kavanagh, Patrick 101, 122–3, 211n‘Canal Bank Walk’ 122–3‘Lines Written on a Seat on the

Grand Canal, Dublin’ 101‘The Hospital’ 101, 103

Keats, John 3, 51Kennedy, David 59, 94, 98King, Henry 11, 34–5Knowles, Margaret A. 4, 6, 8Kristeva, Julia 12Kushner, Rose 14, 85

Lacan, Jacques 56Lain, Sonia 6Lakoff, George 15, 164Lane, David P. 6Larkin, Philip 19, 25–6, 198

‘Aubade’, 25–6, 198‘Church Going’ 19‘Sunny Prestatyn’ 19

leukaemia 29–31, 130–143Lewis, Claire 218nLewis, Gwyneth 163, 166–74,

182, 188A Hospital Odyssey 163, 166–72, 174Two in a Boat: A Marital Voyage 166

Lifshitz, Leatrice H. 14liver cancer 5, 87–9, 220nLongley, Michael 74–7

‘In Memoriam’ 74–6‘Wounds’ 76

Lorde, Audre 15, 84–9, 93–4, 96, 98, 100

The Cancer Journals 84–7, 89The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance

84, 86–9‘Construction’ 88‘Hugo I’ 87–8‘Restoration: A Memorial –

9/18/91’ 87–8‘Today Is Not the Day’ 88–9

lumpectomy 79–80, 102lung cancer 4, 10, 101, 200n

MacNeice, Louis 126Malone, Martin 193–4Mann, Thomas 199nMarcus Aurelius 160, 216nMasefield, John 73, 208n mastectomy 8, 15, 79–80, 84–6,

89–92, 94–100, 192, 210nMatthews, Steven 161McDonald, Peter 152–4metastasis 6–7, 10–12, 17, 29, 71–2,

87, 136, 140, 144, 148, 156–7, 173, 179, 207n, 209n

Milton, John 3, 27–8, 38, 178Molloy, Dorothy 220nMorgan, Edwin 54–6, 125–30, 213n

‘Gorgo and Beau’ 54–6, 125–30Moryson, Fynes 185–6Muldoon, Paul 1, 4, 17, 69–74, 77–8,

144–62, 172, 175–90, 193, 198, 207n, 208n, 214n, 215n, 216n

‘Gathering Mushrooms’ 161Horse Latitudes 146, 158,

161–2, 179‘Alba’ 151‘Hedge School’ 17, 146, 156–8,

182–3‘Horse Latitudes’ 146–7,

149–56, 158‘Baginburn’ 148‘Beersheba’ 147‘Beijing’ 147–8‘Berwick-upon-Tweed’ 147‘Blackwater Fort’ 151–2‘Bronkhorstspruit’ 147‘Burma’ 152–3

‘Sillyhow Stride’ 1, 4, 146, 161–2, 219n

‘Turkey Buzzards’ 146, 158–61

Index 231

Maggot 179, 182–3‘A Hare at Aldergrove’ 183–90‘Balls’ 179, 182–3‘Moryson’s Fancy’ 185–7‘When the Pie Was Opened’

179–82‘Profumo’ 73‘7, Middagh Street’ 73The Annals of Chile 144, 147,

175, 219n‘César Vallejo: Testimony’ 72,

208n‘Incantata’ 17, 72–3, 144–5, 147,

151, 161, 175–9, 188, 208n, 214n, 215n, 219n

‘Yarrow’ 69–74, 77–8, 144–5, 172, 208n

‘The Goose’ 148–9, 184‘The Point of Poetry’ 176‘The Sightseers’ 144

Müller, Johannes 4

National Cancer Act 7National Cancer Institute 7

Olds, Sharon 57–65, 69, 77The Father 57–64

‘Beyond Harm’ 62‘Death and Morality’ 59–60,

62‘Death and Murder’ 57‘His Smell’ 60‘His Terror’ 59‘I Wanted to Be There When My

Father Died’ 58, 63‘Last Acts’ 62‘My Father Speaks to Me from the

Dead’ 63–4‘Nullipara’ 58–9, 62‘One Year’ 62–3‘The Dead Body’ 57‘The Exact Moment of

His Death’ 60‘The Feelings’ 60–1‘The Look’ 60 ‘The Waiting’ 57–8‘To My Father’ 58‘Waste Sonata’ 58‘What Shocked Me When My

Father Died’ 61–2

Ostriker, Alicia Suskin 89–93, 96, 100, 210n

‘Scenes from a Mastectomy’ 210nThe Crack in Everything 89

‘The Mastectomy Poems’ 89, 96‘Healing’ 92‘Mastectomy’ 90–1‘Normal’ 91‘Riddle: Post-Op’ 90‘What Was Lost’ 89–90‘Wintering’ 91–2‘The Bridge’ 89, 92

ovarian cancer 11, 70–1, 124–5, 150, 158–60, 207n, 216n

Owen, Wilfred 3–4, 17

Paisley, Ian 220npastoral elegy 27, 29–30, 33–5, 45–6,

49–50, 56, 66, 142, 145, 178Patterson, James T. 64Pecorino, Lauren 5–6, 8, 199n, 200nPhelan, Peggy 164Picardie, Ruth 10, 16Plath, Sylvia 55, 57–8, 61, 68, 203n,

207nPotter, Dennis 17Powers, Mary Farl 72, 144, 151, 175Priestman, Terry 201nprostate cancer 5, 8, 125, 130

radiotherapy 7–9, 11, 13, 23, 79, 102, 118, 143, 169, 171, 181, 201n

Ramazani, Jahan 145, 204nRaz, Hilda 79–81Read, Cathy 79Reading, Peter 163Reid, Christopher 21, 28, 40–7, 50,

52, 108–9, 205nA Scattering 21, 40–1, 46

‘A Reasonable Thing to Ask’ 44‘A Scattering’ 43‘A Widower’s Dozen’ 43‘Afterlife’ 46‘An Italian Market’ 45–6‘Flowers in Wrong Weather’ 45,

205n‘Lucinda’s Way’ 46‘Soul’ 44‘The Flowers of Crete’ 40–2‘The Unfinished’ 42–3

232 Index

Reid, Christopher – continuedThe Song of Lunch 108–9

Rich, Adrienne 86Rilke, Rainer Maria 141

Sacks, Peter M. 56, 206n, 213nScarry, Elaine 141–2Schweizer, Harold 60Scotting, Paul 199n, 200nSedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 80–1Senn, Werner 134, 140Sexton, Anne 56–7, 64–9, 77, 93

‘Dreaming the Breasts’ 68–9‘The Division of Parts’ 66–7‘The Double Image’ 64–5, 93‘The Operation’ 67–8

Shakespeare, William 216nShapcott, Jo 101–10, 113, 122

Of Mutability 101–9‘Deft’ 105‘Era’ 104‘Hairless’ 106‘La Serenissima’ 104–5‘Of Mutability’ 103‘Piss Flower’ 109‘Procedure’ 108‘Scorpion’ 106–7‘Shrubbery’ 107‘Stargazer’ 107–8‘The Oval Pool’ 105–6

Shelley, Percy Bysshe 3, 88skin cancer 5Sontag, Susan 13–16, 134–6, 149–50,

153–4, 158, 216n‘AIDS and Its Metaphors’ 149‘Illness as Metaphor’ 13–16, 134–6,

149–50, 154, 158Spargo, R. Clifton 38Stacey, Jackie 9–11, 17, 165, 213n

Stapelkamp, Ceilidh 13, 209nstem cells 8, 168–72

Táin Bó Cúailnge 180T-cells 8, 168Tennyson, Alfred 3, 28, 34, 122, 145,

174, 203n, 204–5n, 206ntesticular cancer 10, 80, 183Thomas, M. Wynn 163, 172Thompson, Phyllis Hoge 14Thornycroft, Thomas 186Tolstoy, Lev Nikolayevich 199nTomlinson, Jane 10total body irradiation 34, 204n‘Trojan Horse’ treatment 8, 172

uterine cancer 71, 207n

Varmus, Harold 11Virgil 119, 126–7

Weinberg, Robert A. 6, 11, 200nWharton, Edith 199nWiman, Christian 102, 115–22

Every Riven Thing 116‘After the Diagnosis’ 116–17, 120‘Darkcharms’ 119–20‘The Mole’ 117–18‘When the Time’s Toxins’ 120–1

‘Gazing into the Abyss’ 115–16, 118–19

Woolf, Virginia 103–4, 108, 141Wordsworth, William 151

Xenophon 152

Yeats, W. B. 106, 124–5, 179, 206n, 211nYolen, Jane 23

Zeiger, Melissa F. 61, 65

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Notes and References