CHRONOLOGY
A gamble, our pizza’s
ready in 10. My partner
retires in three months
or thirty something
shifts. Last week the
patient had a fever
or headache. We’ve been downtown
five
hours now. Don a paper
gown in the wind.
Knot secure the neck and
waist, respirator next.
Wedge goggles over glasses.
Gloves over gown
wrist. Her mother deftly
dicing onions for tonight.
Unfurl the stretcher/
reach under gown/lock up
curb/tight turns the
ramp/elevator
down the hall. Hypoxic brain
injury happens
within three to six
minutes. The water is finally
hot enough as her whole
body folds to meet
the drain. But first she
takes a shower, to wake up
a little. These days of
quarantine drag on.
Guelph-based
poet and paramedic
Candace de Taeye’s full-length poetry debut is
Pronounced/Workable
(Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2022), a collection composed as sketch-notes
during work-shifts. “
Two thumbs on the lower third of the sternum with
fingers,” she writes, to close the poem “BLS STANDARDS -OBSTETRICS,” “tearing
into that croissant, cradling cappuccino. /
Encircling the chest and
supporting the back. / Promoted off the road at your discretion, or it’s /
been
determined that birth is imminent.” Through a progression of first-person
lyric narratives, de Taeye writes directly into the nuts-and-bolts of her work
and experiences as a Toronto-area paramedic, offering description and
commentary, or simply the jarring effect of pure detail. And yet, de Taeyre’s
poems read with a particularly casual and deceptive ease, as though composed in
mid-thought, mid-stride, and everything in-between, even through utilizing an
array of formal techniques, whether the pantoum, list poem, call-and-response, open
lyric or sonnet-sequence. “
And service providers from being subjected /
to,”
she writes, in the opening poem, “PREFACE TO BASIC LIFE SUPPORT STANDARDS,” “always
remember that resuscitation is one part lullaby. //
Provide verbal and where
deemed appropriate, tactile /
comfort and reassurance. That you have
mistaken my hunger // for sadness.” She works through formal structures almost
as a way to sharpen each poem’s focus, hold each mess of language, experience
and realization together as she attends to medical emergencies and the chaos of
working on the front lines of medical trauma and recovery. The chaos is held, it
would seem, precisely by and even through such formal techniques.
There’s
a polyvocality to many of de Taeyre’s pieces, one that allows for multiple
threads and characters to float through the tapestry of her narratives, which
both attend to any particular situation’s potential uncertainty and chaos, as
well as allow potential patients and others their own voice through the storm. Through
these, de Taeye’s experiences don’t fall into mere reportage-per-se, but
something interwoven, even unsettling. As Shane Neilson offers as part of his
back cover blurb, doctors do tend to dominate the realm of Canadian medical
poetry, although it is curious to note that Mansfield also recently published a
poetry collection by one of those as well, Dr. Conor Mc Donnell’s full-length
debut, Recovery Community (2020) [see my review of such here]. Medical
poetry, one might say, is alive and well in Canada, despite whatever crises
might exist in the current medical field.
