HCSHR 3:8 — Harold Feddersen, Holding Hands

HCSHR 3:8 — Harold Feddersen, Holding Hands; being present through my father’s cancer. 2018, 2019. ISBN 978-1-9994502-0-5. 6”x9”, 118 pages. Print 15$, kindle 10$. Amazon.ca

                                                                                                     reviewed by Sandra Stephenson

Holding Hands is a series of poems, each one an inexorable step staggered on the page like a pathway through the unknown, ever downward. The form of the book evokes haibun, the prose that begins each section more gripping than most of the poems, which are limp as the poet must have felt. Sensory allusions to sound and the use of onomatopoeia, don’t bring the reader right into the environment, but leave us observing the misfortune of another. One that could easily be us or our children. The author, the son of a cancer-ridden patient, describes his own sense of being on the outside looking in: “I didn’t even realize I was living in hope until some moment cracked the illusion I was in.”

what I want
       smashing head first
               into what is

three conversations/ few facts overlapping/ like these window blinds

I’ve chosen to overlap poems by way of examples, as the poems themselves overlap each other and repeat. The best quality of this book is information: it’s a human-sized pamphlet to help prepare for the travail of cancer, covid, or any invasive medical treatment and outcomes. The poems are notes, a thoughtful daily log-book without artifice, abbreviated as if the writer hasn’t the heart to bother with grammatical conventions like articles, as “around shrinking stomach/ a new belt hole/ [. . .]” They keep the author’s observations clinical, however true and personal. They are like “window frames/ passing scenery/ [. . .]”

Only once the journal asks and answers the question, why? Why go through the pain of therapy, but for hope? An enduring hope that inhabits the collection right to the last line of page 33, where the collection could have ended as a chapbook.

“Why are we at the hospital?”/ he doesn’t know/ his burden

Maybe the answer, which I gained in my own experience of caring for my mother at her days’ end, lies in this line: “comfort zone expands”. A care-giver becomes bigger. How the “hard father of my youth” developed “gentle hands” finally. The dying person becomes bigger, and the caregiver gets to witness that. What caregivers get from the painful experience is partly the gift of presence, as Feddersen points out, and partly something to take away, an expansion alongside the contraction of loss.

family stories
       held within one person
               leaving in an out breath

my father’s breath/ follows me home/ in my shirt

my weight/ leaning on music/ [. . .]

The collection goes on and on, looks like it’s come to an end several times, revives for another day.

/ [. . .] adult aloneness/ presses father’s chest

/ closing 70 years of friendship/ with a handshake

/ my courage to live/ unbridled and free

my girlfriend and I/ not surviving/

two men dying
       one slowly, one quickly
               holding hands

Including the pain section all in one clump at the end was probably not a great idea as far as books go, but the Epilogue holds some comfort. For readers outside the family, day-by-day accounting is not necessary, I think, except insofar as it provides an example of what a person might do for themselves during such a journey. This book needed an editor with scissors to be more prepossessing, even though no amount of cutting could lighten the load of father and son, or shorten their long struggle.

I, a sprinter/ this endurance challenge/ just that

father folds his blanket/ into unknown/ origami shapes

As well as lightening the length of the book, some of the haiku could be lightened by feathering line breaks. For example, in the “family stories” verse quoted above, simply moving the word “held” to the end of the first line provides a pause, a syncope, a faint, a leaving of one generation and taking up by the next in one simple relocation of one word.

I thank Harold Feddersen for this collection. Holding Hands is topical and useful in a time of inexplicable death and separation.

Sandra Stephenson
May 2020

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