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Cobalt 3 (Ronsdale $13.95)
When Kevin Roberts was told in 1987 that he had non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma in an advanced stage, he was struck by shock, anger, panic and the huge eyes of his wife. "I'm going to beat this bastard,"; he decided.
He travelled from Lantzville two or three times a week to North Vancouver for chemotherapy treatments. He felt foolish for having ignored those lumps, for ignoring the advice of his GP, an internal medicine specialist and his wife. Now he felt very sick, weak and depressed. His hair fell out. He was on an inadequate disability pension. "Few people realize how costly it is to get sick,"; he says.
He felt like an actor in a bad TV role. He was playing everybody else's script. The doctors and the fearful family tried to direct; friends offered how-to-die books, drowned him in sympathy or averted their eyes. He wanted his old role back. "They expect butterfly grace,"; he says, "and the best you can do is imitate a crawling chemo caterpillar. And you realize, suddenly, you're a professional actor in a role unrehearsed that everybody plays only once.";
He began to hate the ferry ride from Departure Bay to Vancouver. After a roller-coaster ride of reprieves and setbacks, he asked for a radical barrage of radiation treatment. His doctors said it would be too dangerous. He left the Cancer Clinic and peered blindly into the window of Future Shop, pretending to be another shopper hunting for bargains on a surrealistic sidewalk.
Roberts took the Greyhound to Edmonton where he received reluctant permission to have a series of 21 shots. This forced his cancer doctors in Vancouver to relent.
"Radiation is a shocker,"; he wrote recently. "My stomach and bowels gave me initially 30 minutes to get to the bathroom at my rented flat. By the 17th shot in Cobalt 3 I was down to 12 minutes flat. I ran or staggered to my car. My blood count was so low that after the 17th shot they sent me home to eat spinach. The hardest thing I have ever done is go back for the last four shots of radiation.";
That was almost ten years ago. The title of Kevin Roberts' Cobalt 3 (Ronsdale $13.95) refers to the radiation room where Roberts was treated in Vancouver. In 40 concise poems he has recounted in gruesome, vivid detail his four-year struggle that proved victorious.
There are plenty of descriptions of painful treatment as in the harrowing poem called Marrow: "The doc's done this 1,000 times, chats/as he flips up your green coat/you grip the thin rails in the bedstead/ a quick prick, the flesh on your hip/freezes distant and dumb/ strangely foreign and far off/the big needle bites into mute/flesh, then, a sudden punch/chunk that shudders your whole/frame, steel stuck in your very/bone/ your fists grip the bedstead/needle digs ice cold hole in your hip/ doc pulls the plunger up, still/chatty, your teeth grind down/he retracts, you flop like a gunshot/deer/he walks off with a pink/snowstorm of marrow in the tube.";
Born in Australia, Roberts has lived for many years in Lantzville and teaches at Malaspina College. He has written 11 books of poetry, eight plays, two collections of short stories and a novel, Tears in a Glass Eye. He says he couldn't have recreated his anguished journey in prose. He wanted instead a mosaic of moodiness, despair and hope to capture the alienation of being a cancer patient.
Cobalt 3 describes, unflinchingly, "the rat stink fear, muscletight/chest, watery flush in your belly/hair fallen on your pillow/hairless groin, puffed up baby face/the coppery panic taste";. But in the same poem he distills the strange sensation of trying to get on with life. "...but outside the landscape has mutated/the sure path down tilts upward/to a weird sunlit hill ahead";.
Kevin Roberts began writing Cobalt 3 about five years ago after re-reading John Donne's 'No man is an island' poem. He decided Donne's famous message was grandiose nonsense. "Born alone, we die alone,"; he says, "and cancer culls us from the herd in huge numbers."; Now he knows he is one of the lucky ones, but he won't take credit for his remission. He won a stubborn battle that could have gone the other way.
"There is nothing heroic about me or the poems,"; he says. "Many others have beaten the beast."; 0-921870-73-6
[Beverly Cramp / BCBW 2000]
He travelled from Lantzville two or three times a week to North Vancouver for chemotherapy treatments. He felt foolish for having ignored those lumps, for ignoring the advice of his GP, an internal medicine specialist and his wife. Now he felt very sick, weak and depressed. His hair fell out. He was on an inadequate disability pension. "Few people realize how costly it is to get sick,"; he says.
He felt like an actor in a bad TV role. He was playing everybody else's script. The doctors and the fearful family tried to direct; friends offered how-to-die books, drowned him in sympathy or averted their eyes. He wanted his old role back. "They expect butterfly grace,"; he says, "and the best you can do is imitate a crawling chemo caterpillar. And you realize, suddenly, you're a professional actor in a role unrehearsed that everybody plays only once.";
He began to hate the ferry ride from Departure Bay to Vancouver. After a roller-coaster ride of reprieves and setbacks, he asked for a radical barrage of radiation treatment. His doctors said it would be too dangerous. He left the Cancer Clinic and peered blindly into the window of Future Shop, pretending to be another shopper hunting for bargains on a surrealistic sidewalk.
Roberts took the Greyhound to Edmonton where he received reluctant permission to have a series of 21 shots. This forced his cancer doctors in Vancouver to relent.
"Radiation is a shocker,"; he wrote recently. "My stomach and bowels gave me initially 30 minutes to get to the bathroom at my rented flat. By the 17th shot in Cobalt 3 I was down to 12 minutes flat. I ran or staggered to my car. My blood count was so low that after the 17th shot they sent me home to eat spinach. The hardest thing I have ever done is go back for the last four shots of radiation.";
That was almost ten years ago. The title of Kevin Roberts' Cobalt 3 (Ronsdale $13.95) refers to the radiation room where Roberts was treated in Vancouver. In 40 concise poems he has recounted in gruesome, vivid detail his four-year struggle that proved victorious.
There are plenty of descriptions of painful treatment as in the harrowing poem called Marrow: "The doc's done this 1,000 times, chats/as he flips up your green coat/you grip the thin rails in the bedstead/ a quick prick, the flesh on your hip/freezes distant and dumb/ strangely foreign and far off/the big needle bites into mute/flesh, then, a sudden punch/chunk that shudders your whole/frame, steel stuck in your very/bone/ your fists grip the bedstead/needle digs ice cold hole in your hip/ doc pulls the plunger up, still/chatty, your teeth grind down/he retracts, you flop like a gunshot/deer/he walks off with a pink/snowstorm of marrow in the tube.";
Born in Australia, Roberts has lived for many years in Lantzville and teaches at Malaspina College. He has written 11 books of poetry, eight plays, two collections of short stories and a novel, Tears in a Glass Eye. He says he couldn't have recreated his anguished journey in prose. He wanted instead a mosaic of moodiness, despair and hope to capture the alienation of being a cancer patient.
Cobalt 3 describes, unflinchingly, "the rat stink fear, muscletight/chest, watery flush in your belly/hair fallen on your pillow/hairless groin, puffed up baby face/the coppery panic taste";. But in the same poem he distills the strange sensation of trying to get on with life. "...but outside the landscape has mutated/the sure path down tilts upward/to a weird sunlit hill ahead";.
Kevin Roberts began writing Cobalt 3 about five years ago after re-reading John Donne's 'No man is an island' poem. He decided Donne's famous message was grandiose nonsense. "Born alone, we die alone,"; he says, "and cancer culls us from the herd in huge numbers."; Now he knows he is one of the lucky ones, but he won't take credit for his remission. He won a stubborn battle that could have gone the other way.
"There is nothing heroic about me or the poems,"; he says. "Many others have beaten the beast."; 0-921870-73-6
[Beverly Cramp / BCBW 2000]
Submitted on July 11, 2003 in By David.
