Towards a Poetics of Suffering: Reading Inside and Outside Virgil's Garden

Towards a Poetics of Suffering: Reading Inside and Outside Virgil’s Garden* KAREN SIMONS Last year in the springtime, I began reading There Is a Season, a memoir by Patrick Lane, one of Canada’s foremost poets. In it Lane oscillates between the remembered world of childhood and his present-day garden on Vancouver Island. The book is not an easy read. Lane’s was a disadvantaged and traumatic childhood in then “rough” small towns of British Columbia’s southern interior. He saw terrible things as a boy. One day, he saw a dead baby at the dump where he and his brothers would go snoop through the garbage for something to do. He poked a stick into a paper bag. The paper tore, and a cotton bundle tumbled out. The bundle was knotted in the middle. He picked at the knot until it gave way. Then “a tiny arm fell out, its fingers clenched, its skin a pale blue” (31). It was a baby girl. She was not a newborn. She had bruises all over her body. Lane told no one what he had seen. If he’d admitted to being at the dump again, he would have received another beating from his father. So he “placed that baby somewhere deep inside where it could be lost” (31).1 That wasn’t the only terrible thing he saw as a child. He used to go hang out alone in the parking lot of a local bar late at night and watch the drunks. Once, while hiding behind the fender of a truck, he saw a drunk woman raped and beaten by three men, her body falling slowly to the pavement when they were done. He stowed that memory away, too. Is it any surprise that Lane started drinking young? By high school, he was drinking hard. He was also writing po- *Frederick Jones, Virgil’s Garden: The Nature of Bucolic Space. London: Bristol Classical Press-Bloomsbury Academic, 2011. 204 pages, $120.00. arion 22.1 spring/summer 2014 etry. When he went to work in a sawmill by day, he wrote poetry late into the night. “I think it was poetry that saved me from killing myself and killing others,” he says. His brother, also a poet, died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of twenty-eight. Their father was murdered. I did not finish reading the book. I stopped soon after the account of the drunk woman who was raped and beaten in the parking lot. If that makes me a cowardly reader, unwilling to share the burden of another as he attempts to communalize suffering, at least I have a good reason. I’d begun reading Lane’s book a few months after my sister died of rapidly spreading brain cancer—ten weeks from diagnosis to death. She’d had a disadvantaged and difficult life, too, though in different ways. We too had lived in B.C.’s southern interior as children, and she too had turned to gardening in her later years (she died at the age of 56)—not in the mild, generative climate of Vancouver Island, like Patrick Lane, but in the harsh conditions of my brother’s ranch in the backwoods of B.C.’s Cariboo region further north. Miles and miles from town on logging roads. No hydro. No running water. Killing frosts early in the fall and late in the spring. Yet she grew enormous cabbages and lettuces, peas, carrots, and kale—and a few flowers for good cheer. Often, before now, I have likened her to Virgil’s Cilician farmer in Georgics 4.126–46, carving out her garden on some patch of ground no one else wanted. My sister did not write poetry like Patrick Lane, though she appreciated it. Her garden was her poetry. It required and gave her focus. It was her creative work and her meditation. It was a place she made for herself. Patrick Lane, after forty years of addiction, gave up alcohol and cocaine. He wrote There Is a Season in the year following his decision to struggle free. In the book, he copes with returning memories by turning his mind from the...

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