Book ReviewIt is probably a rare American who does not know someone who has been a car accident that in some way changed their life. And most have heard, if only on television, of individuals whose accident resulted in traumatic brain injury. A Google search in the Internet instantly yields millions of articles offering explanations, counseling, advice and even personal experience of traumatic brain injury, but one thing the search is not likely to turn up is a book of poetry. Soon it may. Louise Mathewson's A Life Interrupted: Living With Brain Injury, now in manuscript form, is a collection of poetry that recounts the after effects of an accident that left her with brain injury. It is always exciting when a poet embarks at length on previously unexplored territory, and this is particularly true in the case of disability literature. Unfortunately, for Mathewson, while there are no collections of poetry that center around injury from a car accident, when it comes to memory loss as a result of trauma to the brain, she faces a couple of heavy hitters: Karen Fiser and Floyd Skloot. Nevertheless, Mathewson has some wiggle room. Fiser an ex-philosophy professor in Losing and Finding and Words Like Fate and Pain writes a sophisticated poetry with many philosophical allusions. Skloot, who is very explicit about his memory loss and language problems in his autobiographical work, handles references to his disability so subtly in such collections of poetry as Music Appreciation, that the reader unfamiliar with his life may not ever pick up on them. Thus, A Life Interrupted has a shot if it can appeal to a different audience. Mathewson's collection leads off with "After the Car Wreck" orienting the reader right away by marking the accident as the pivotal event from which all of the other poems spring. It also set the reader up to anticipate that there will be some psychological archeology going on in this volume. The accident is described in bare terms: Car totaled brain shirred, In a "A Computer Crash" Mathewson compares her head hitting the dashboard to a computer hard drive crashing. The references to computer crashes and of cells and neurons malfunctioning is certainly engaging and a propos, but an even more interesting aspects of Mathewson experience comes during the ensuing coma. In "Life Was Interrupted," she says: I hear an announcement This in-coma experience haunts Mathewson once she emerges from the coma and stays with her, shaping her perceptions as the book goes along. Immediately, however, what she finds out upon awaking is what "I Didn't Know": I didn't know Following this, is one of the most effective poems in the book, "Lost." While comparing her confusion to a brain without a map is hardly new, the simplicity with which she carries it off stand in eloquent contrast to the mental state she writes of. The poems that fill the remainder of the book include titles such as "Strange Jet Lag," "Shame," "Dungeons of Despair" and "It Didn't Used to Be Like This," all describing the authors loss and her attempts. For all of the poems about loss, however, Mathewson, never gives the reader a glimpse at what that life was like that was lost. She writes in "A Lode of Grief": My voice changes, But just who this me is, is never hinted at. It may be true that in the real world memory has obscured this past life, this other me, from the author. But as a poet she has an obligation to reconstruct that life for the reader in some way and not ask them just to imagine the past life if her poetry is going to be effective. Another problem facing A Life Interrupted is that after the first fifteen pages, there are simply too many of the same poems saying the same thing. There are books that work well by the piling on of images to create a collage-like portrait at the end or in which the repetition of an image such as a head hitting a dashboard serve as a sort of leitmotif that accumulates meaning as the book goes along - but this is not the case in Matthewson's poetry. Individual poems that read well on their own prove tiring when repeated with nothing new for the reader. A similar concern exists with the authors frequent use litany as a poetic form. Sparingly, it can be used effectively, as in "Life After Brain Injury", but when the same technique turns up several pages later it not only dilutes the power of the first poem but begins to look like lack of imagination. In both cases, a good thinning out of the poems would really result in more, not less. To her credit, Mathewson does return to the image of the angel speaking about transformation in the final half dozen poems of the book. In the end she sees it as God's way of working through her to make her a more substantial person: If not The final three lines of the book encapsulate its theme: Thank you God This thesis, that trauma is sent to us by God as a means of making us a better person, is going to meet with loud opposition from disability rights advocates who see such a position as one that impedes social progress for people with disabilities by throwing the onus for change back on the individual. Nevertheless, conversional narrative has a literary tradition at least as far back as Augustine, so political position in itself should trump artistic merit in poetry. That being said, there are readers to whom A Life Interrupted will appeal. It will not be the admirers of Fiser or Skloot, whose works are full of cultural allusions and complex metaphors. It will be those who prefer direct language and accessible imagery from a person who has experienced traumatic brain injury first hand. And while Mathewson, mercifully, has not labeled her work "inspirational", there are others who will see it that way because of the final poems, and among those readers, A Life Interrupted, if it is published, will likely also find an audience. |