Many books written about the author’s illness or disability – be it memoir or poetry – tend toward the “listen to me!” or “poor me!”, describing in redundant detail the gorey, traumatic or just plain banal circumstances of the life the author wants you to hear/read about. Usually simply because they lived it.
Not so with Jim Ferris’ award-winning collection The Hospital Poems. Yes, this is a theme book. Yes, it describes many facets of the poet’s own disability. But Ferris’ poems move beyond the mere presentation of disability as spectacle. It even moves beyond illness as metaphor, to borrow a phrase.
As the introduction by Paul K. Longmore astutely assesses, “these poems express the humanity common to people with and without disabilities.” That is not to say Ferris gives equal time to both, for in his first poem of the collection, “Poet of Cripples,” he asserts:
Let me be a poet of cripples
of hollow men and boys groping
to be whole, of girls limping toward
womanhood and women reaching back,
all slipping and falling toward the cavern
we carry within, our hidden void…
When Ferris was born, his left leg was shorter than his right. Many operations throughout his childhood sought to stimulate the bone growth to “catch up” with its counterpart. Ferris adeptly captures the subtleties of such an affect on a young boy in his poem “Sweet Soul Music”:
… The moon is blue,
love me do, I’ll be true to you. But it’s Telstar
so far away, Detroit city, oh, how I want
to go home, homeward bound, I wish I was…
these are the songs that pierce my cover, that call my clan,
that cry in my voice in the can, in the closeted
hospital night. But I always want to walk like a man.
The Hospital Poems won the 2004 Main Street Rag book award, selected by Edward Hirsch. Its deft insight will open your eyes to a world you may have never considered as parallel to your own.
54 pages
This is Ferris’ first poetry collection.
