The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine

Book Review

Body of Diminishing Motion: Poems and a Memoir
by Joan Seliger Sidney
123 pp; $14.00
CavanKerry Press, Ltd.
Fort Lee, New Jersey
www.cavankerrypress.org
Reviewed by Pamela S. Wagner (pamwagg@cox.net).

Joan Seliger Sidney’s marvelous book, Body of Diminishing Motion, has not only turned illness, specifically multiple sclerosis, into a proper subject for poetry. It has transformed disease in general into something much larger than itself, something that embodies the quintessence of poetry and the fundamental struggle for balance between inspiration and control that all writers face.
In the title poem, the poet writes of the thirty years she denied “the day might come / when to walk across a room / might be too far.” The strength of her control, her power, surprises, how as her abilities wane, she manages to conceal from herself the fact that that day will come, and will one day be here, when denial will no longer protect her from reality. But the poem ends with the sublime loss of control that poets dream of, what used to be called afflatus, the muse whispering poems from thin air: “So many voices / through me trying to speak. / Shechinah, female face of God, //...Let me tell their stories and mine.

With her spare, precise, yet lovely lines, pared to the essential, Sidney’s poems are elegance fulfilled in simplicity. Several leitmotifs interest her elucidating the larger theme: Secrecy surrounds Sidney’s disease; she insists her parents never learn the truth -- ”[H]ow can I tell you // why I drag my feet to walk?...// with every step...I know/ I disappoint you” is from “Preserves,” the first poem in the book; but multiple sclerosis is fundamentally, cellularly, a loss of muscle control as a result of degradation of myelin surrounding the nerve, which leads to very public consequences. The Holocaust deaths of grandparents and other relatives is surely the supreme loss, but recounting the history of those who survived empowers -- in the how’s and why’s of that retelling at least.

Other foci recur throughout the book, important to Sidney: friendship in the midst of struggle; kindnesses, big and small and the difference they make; the importance of and the ambivalence towards family and family history, wanting to forget, to live ‘a normal life’ and wanting to keep that history alive: “Why do you say you escaped, / Mother when you are still / trapped among their bones?” (“Leaving”); the struggle of Sidney to heal herself, to find The Cure, versus the recognition that she is relentlessly losing strength no matter what she does.
This is the stuff of top-notch poetry, poetry as ‘language doing holy things to the ordinary.’ Something as common, if little talked about, as childhood games of strip poker, are transformed under Sidney’s careful eye into a bodily experience  “I shiver, hug my shoulders with crossed hands, / down to my cotton panties, my first bra. / ... Their eyes / make me hot and cold at the same time” -- bringing one back to those same games, the chill, the thrill, the embarrassment, the shame, the inevitable discovery by one parent or another. These are poems that celebrate the body -- a woman bringing herself to orgasm in a swimming pool shower: “It’s just the two of us: this woman / busy with her body and me, the voyeur” (“Nude”) -- even as they curse Sidney’s own limitations and increasing debilitation.

And she does curse her illness, she hates it and what it has done to her, does not relish the patient role; she doesn’t pretend it has added more to her life than it has taken away; she would give it back in a second. But she is working on acceptance and has wrought a lovely book of poems in its wake, poetry that wakes in us an understanding both of MS and of how it feels to have to deal with any chronic degenerative disease. This is a book that most definitely was needed in the world and Sidney has done an admirable job in giving it to us.

Published: July 7, 2005