I was so happy to see Marlene's beautiful book. I first met Marlene at our workplace just before her retirement, when she told me that her life from then on would be devoted to creating poetry. Over the past years, she has been published in many high-profile journals, constantly strengthening her insights, language and imagery, an inspiration that poets who persevere will find their way.
Her chapbook Cancer's Rogue Season was beautifully produced by Frog Hollow Press. A haunting black and white photograph showing a tree leaning over a cliff toward water graces the cover.The paper feels lovely, the whole book a divine sensual pleasure to look at and touch. The cover photo leads the reader into the jungle of cancer: its forests, savage-jawed predators, dark rivers. We are lost in Dante's midlife journey through the pathless realm of nature indifferent to our struggles.
The eleven poems on the theme of cancer's savagery are relatable for anyone who has a body that is subject to old age, illness and death. The poems are wild and emotional, using imagery from nature, as in her description of the process of chemotherapy, "a machete that cuts back serpentine vines as it travels rivers of blood." There is humour as well, "A disease too indolent to kill quickly, its furtive cells loll in the lymphoid jungle, beasts lost in the guile of sloth." Well, it is a kind of humour, albeit tragic.
Okay, where is the comfort in this relentless landscape? I would say it is in the outer landscape: "What quickens in me....to be elemental --buffeted, and held by feldspar gale saltwater."
Through her powerful, evocative poems, Marlene provides both pleasure and inspiration as to what an artist can achieve while coping with an insidious life situation.
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