Embracing Brings You Back - Softcover

Clifford, Pat

9781550503395: Embracing Brings You Back

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1550503391 ISBN 13: 9781550503395

Publisher: Coteau Books, 2006

Powerful, unsentimental poems about the ability to have cancer and still retain a raunchy energy for life, with the support of those around you. Pat Clifford is writing poems and prayers, elegies and lamentations, about her experiences in the daily fight for her life. She stares the mad stranger of cancer in the eye and dares it to try and take away her humanity and her love of life. She embraces plain, direct language in engaging the battle. As Susan Sontag demands in Illness as Metaphor, she must, at all stages, undress the concealing language of those who seek to dress up the plain truth. Clifford makes it clear that she has not been alone in that fight. She pays tribute to the family and dearest friends who have supported her in so many ways throughout her battle. And she witnesses and honours the many women she has gotten to know in the support group at her cancer centre. They become more than a random collection of women thrown together by dire circumstances.

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From the Publisher:

Pat Clifford is writing poems and prayers, elegies and lamentations, about her experiences in the daily fight for her life. She stares the mad stranger of cancer in the eye and dares it to try and take away her humanity and her love of life. She embraces plain, direct language in engaging the battle. As Susan Sontag demands in Illness as Metaphor, she must, at all stages, undress the concealing language of those who seek to dress up the plain truth.

Clifford makes it clear that she has not been alone in that fight. She pays tribute to the family and dearest friends who have supported her in so many ways throughout her battle. And she witnesses and honors the many women she has gotten to know in the support group at her cancer centre. They become more than a random collection of women thrown together by dire circumstances. A recurring image in Embracing Brings you Back is of the Iroquois False Face Society. The false faces are masks representing supernatural beings who lived on earth until recent times, and who can confer healing powers on the worthy. The False Face Curing Society is eager to heal as many people as possible thereby expanding its numbers, because as membership in the Society increases, so does the healing power of the group.

In the midst of this communal approach to challenging cancer, however, a person is also frequently alone with her body, her pain and her thoughts. The result, in Pat Clifford’s case, is these courageous, affirming, fighting poems.

About the Author:

Pat Clifford is a teacher, education consultant and researcher. She has published widely in academic journals and books. Embracing Brings You Back is her first book of poetry. Raised in Saskatoon, she has been writing since her days in school – but it is her experience of living with recurrent ovarian cancer that provided the impetus to return to poetry after too many years’ absence. She has lived Calgary since 1976.

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