Clare Best reviews MX SIMP by Kate Hendry (Mariscat Press, 2023)
Should this review of Kate Hendry’s new pamphlet carry a trigger warning? Perhaps, in as much as life should carry one. Here you will find breast cancer and surgical procedures, scans and scars, pain, fear, irony, reality, surreality, love and humour. It’s a rich and potent mix. Consider yourself warned.
Beyond the emotive issues, and the emotions, this short collection (one of six finalists for the 2023 Michael Marks Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet and published by Mariscat Press, winner of the 2023 Michael Marks Best Publisher Award) embraces and celebrates language in all its devastating power, and – in celebrating language – fully celebrates every aspect of life.
First, the title of the pamphlet, and of one of the longest poems in it: MX SIMP. These are the letters that the speaker’s surgeon draws “on my left breast, / with a black marker, and arrows, / so there’ll be no doubt / that this breast is the one / that is to go.” And the letters later reappear printed in reverse on the speaker’s palm when she holds her breast “for the last time.” MX SIMP is distilled and abbreviated medical-speak for “simple mastectomy” and here already the ironic use of language is clear. Mastectomy is not “simple” for the patient, the letters define the speaker for a while, and their ink sinks into her skin. And beyond the medical resonance of this usage of SIMP, there is part of “sympathy”. Another layer too: consider the occasional use of Mx as a title avoiding expectations that may come with Ms, Miss, Mrs or Mr. So, six letters for the title, and it’s plain we are reading a poet who knows how to handle the subtleties, grenades and uneasy truces of the English language.
The poems in MX SIMP show language being used in quite specific ways – as power, as control, as guardian or shelter, as a method of orientation, as stay against fear, as comfort or consolation, as adventure into joy or relief.
We are reading a poet who knows how to handle the subtleties, grenades and uneasy truces of the English language
Several of the poems, for instance ‘Breaking the News’ and ‘Famous Women with Breast Cancer’ (which more or less enclose the collection), harbour collections of names. There is a multitude of friends and family in the former, with the names and identities helping to locate and focus the shocks and challenges of a cancer diagnosis, however scattered and overwhelming their reactions to the speaker’s news. In the latter poem, there is another multitude of those who have had, or who have, breast cancer. The barrages of names offer remote companionship in the lonely world of cancer treatment and suggest chants or spells that might provide a bulwark against the disease, such as “All the / semi-famous people standing up to cancer on Celebrity / Gogglebox” (‘Famous Women with Breast Cancer’).
Certain other names prove to be of key significance. The name of the speaker’s surgeon, Mr Auld, appears several times in both ‘Mr Auld’s List’ and ‘Mr Auld at the Airport’. Repetitions of his name bring a combination of fear, absurdity and finally humour. I can’t help thinking of him as “old” and I hear ‘Auld Lang Syne’ in my head, with Robert Burns’ words meaning “days gone by” conjuring the layers of melancholy, nostalgia and hope in a year’s turning. Mr Auld’s opposite number in ‘Mr Auld’s List’ is Mr Cook, which reminded me of Happy Families or a Grimm fairy tale. Together Mr Auld and Mr Cook are like those two figures in a weather house who never appear together. Humour, again, by suggestion.
Freya, the name of the speaker’s daughter, only appears once in ‘A Spell for Freya’ – the second poem in the pamphlet – but this poem carries so much of the promise and heft involved in parenthood, and so much of the responsibility of conveying news, that Freya’s name (close to “freight”, sounding like “fray” and “afraid”) stays centrally in the frame of the collection: “Freya – after surgery, I’ll be crazed and cracked, / like the baby bowl you cherish which broke / last week into half-moons, which your father // repaired with superglue, which has a crooked / yellow scar, edge to edge”.
The poems in MX SIMP dance, tumble and juggle, always celebrating language and life, constantly providing light and showing the power of resisting the shadows
I sometimes wonder how the language of hospital encounters seems to veer between the deliberately vague and the straightforwardly scientific, leaving few places for a lay-person to meet a medical expert. Often a few words spoken by a specialist feed periods of reflection and anxiety that follow a key hospital appointment or conversation. Several poems in MX SIMP, including ‘Things are Pretty Much as we Thought’, ‘Early’ and ‘Untoward’, show the speaker wrestling with snippets of language that seem, in time, almost to become tools of negotiation – with herself or with medical experts. Hendry digs into this territory with wit and fervour, the puzzle of language itself somehow still providing consolations in, for example, the lyrical investigation into terminology in ‘Early’:
So I stick with early for the way it reminds me
of children’s nurseries, and the bird
which catches the worm, and music before
harmony and days for the start
of a long process that asks for patience.
In other poems, Hendry probes language as accident or adventure (‘Autocorrect’), language as ritual (‘Wheel of Thanks’) and language as tantalising comfort (‘Goldenacre Path’). But she steps beyond all of this in the long poem ‘Mark, Michelle, the Monkey and Me’, which collapses time and memory and seems to use language as a stay against pain and dread, yet also as a way to enact going into and through trauma. This is a magnificent piece, though difficult to honour in a short quotation, so you’ll have to buy the pamphlet.
Having written about experiences of breast cancer in my own family and about my risk-reducing bilateral mastectomies, and having read around the subject extensively over the years, I am often struck by how the literature of breast cancer still retains areas of difficulty and ghosts of taboos. I understand the fear of breast cancer. I know how relationships are affected on every level by surgery and its aftermath. I am familiar with the adjustments that all amputees must face, and the phantom pain (physical and psychological) that reminds us of loss. Hendry tackles all these areas with wit and levity, intelligence and courage: the poems in MX SIMP dance, tumble and juggle, always celebrating language and life, constantly providing light and showing the power of resisting the shadows.
Clare Best has published a memoir, The Missing List, three full collections of poetry, and several pamphlets and collaborative works. Her latest publications are End of Season / Fine di stagione (Frogmore Press, 2022) and Beyond the Gate (Worple Press, 2023). Clare often collaborates with visual artists and musicians. In 2020-21 she was a Fellow at Guildhall School of Music & Drama. Clare Best’s website is here.
