Whale Song: A Poet’s Journey into Cancer by Kenneth W. Brewer (review)

3 1 6 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e F a l l 2 0 0 8 Whale Song: A Poet’s Journey into Cancer. By Kenneth W. Brewer. Salt Lake City, UT: Dream Garden Press, 2007. 104 pages, $15.00. Reviewed by Katharine Coles University of Utah, Salt Lake City Kenneth Brewer was known for many years primarily (though by no means entirely) as a poet of the mask. Perhaps because of his background and interest in the theater, many of his best-known works were dramatic monologues or persona poems, in which he took on figures as diverse as a mongrel (a sort of urban coyote figure), male and female characters in rural Utah, an old man, and a ghost. He was also known for the care with which he crafted his poems, which were tightly, often narrowly, constructed. But in his final book, Whale Song: A Poet’s Journey into Cancer, undertaken after he was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer, Brewer appears to us naked—unrefined, unomamented, essentially unconstructed. In their breadth and passion, the poems reveal the range and forthrightness of which he was— or perhaps of which his new awareness of mortality made him— capable. In “Morning Light, Evening Light,” for example, he employs what are for him unusually expansive lines and sentences, and in this expansiveness he finds himself able to traverse emotions and places: ... [S]uddenly the room filled with morning light surprising me with its beauty, the room shining, the glass fusion plate catching the sun, firing back more shades of blue than I could ever name, the paintings of red desert landscapes blazing, the intaglio of Prague from a rooftop perspective with Kafka’s square sparkling like snowy pines, the van Gogh poster, Amsterdam 2002, shifting red to yellow to green beside Borch’s doorway, the watercolor of blue-white clouds above the west march catching the sun as if geese were about to rise for the wheat fields. A man confined to his room, in love with the world and already missing it, needing a form that can contain both the absent world as remembered by the posters and paintings on the light-struck walls and the present scene outside a rural Utah window, a lifetime’s joy and sorrow together, one thing: this is his voice, at once full-throated and rough. The volume presents the poems precisely as they came. Thus, the collec­ tion follows the course of his cancer, from diagnosis into the depth of illness. There is no table of contents, but the poems are dated, and from the dates the reader comes to understand that while there are days when Brewer is well enough to produce drafts of more than one poem, on other days he can’t write at all. Thus, the dates become important to the poems’ narrative, and the gaps B o o k r e v ie w s 3 1 7 between poems— a couple of days when he is too ill from chemotherapy to write, a week spent in the hospital— come to represent silences almost as poi­ gnant as the poems themselves. If it is ironic it may not nonetheless be a surprise that these poems, in all their roughness and candor, are those that finally made Brewer famous in his lifetime. For though he was beloved and well known in Utah and southern Idaho, Brewer’s work never broke through to a larger audience. The poems in Whale Song, however, with their particular grit and grace, led to appearances on regional and national radio and television, and since the book’s publication, they have become mainstays of cancer literature and models to patients of an approach to illness that is strong and tender, full of passion and compassion. Among them are his best poems, those for which I suspect he will continue to be remembered, both for their remarkable content and for their execution. There is nothing pretty in these poems, but there is much of beauty and even of sublimity in the old sense of the word: in which...