While reading Embracing Brings You Back, I was reminded of the many ways in which poetry enriches human life. For a poet, writing is a way of making sense of the peaks, valleys and plains of one's life, yet it's uncanny how a poet's personal experience can often also mirror and give voice to our own.
So it was when I was in Calgary recently for a family member's cancer surgery at the Foothills Medical Centre. I brought two new books to review – one does a lot of sitting and waiting in hospitals – and when I opened Clifford's inaugural collection of poems, I learned that the poet was diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer in 2002 and had also received her treatment at the Foothills Medical Centre. This, I feel, was more than a coincidence: sometimes poetry finds us when and where we need it most.
Clifford's accessible poems trace her journey with cancer, but the former Saskatonian also celebrates life even through its challenges. When the right words are placed in the right order on the page, readers can be "left nearly breathless." These three words are the first in the opening poem of Clifford's collection, and they neatly sum up how I was often left after reading her work. In the poem "Bilingual," she writes of "drugs that sound like Mexican/time-shares, or maybe drinks with an umbrella/you can't believe you ordered/from the swim-up bar," and later in that same poem, "it is amazing, says/the woman beside me in the white/waiting room, just what the hell/you find yourself getting used to." How true.
It's a daunting task to find the poetry within one of the most insidious diseases known to humankind. Clifford searches her own experience to present poems that expand our understanding of how this disease affects patients and those who love them. The poems in Embracing Brings You Back teach us that it is possible to "lick/life's honey from a razor's edge."
