Blue Peninsula: Essential Words for a Life of Loss and Change

By Madge McKeithen

Book Overview

"My son's illness is eight years old and has no name. It started when he was fourteen. He is now twenty-two. It is taking away his ability to walk and to reason. It is getting worse, some years more rapidly than others." These words begin the first section ofBlue Peninsula, a narrative of a son's degenerative illness in thirty-three parts focused around poems that have provided companionship and sustenance to the author. When multiple diagnostic avenues delivered no explanation for the worsening disabilities of her older son, Ike, Madge McKeithen "became a poetry addict--collecting, consuming, ripping poems out of magazines, buying slender volumes that would fit in my pocket or pocketbook, stashing them in loose-leaf notebooks, on shelves, stacking them on the floor. In the midst of all this grief, I had fallen in love. With words. Poems, especially. And just in time." McKeithen draws on a wonderfully wide ranging group of of poets and lyricists--including Emily Dickinson, the Rolling Stones, Paul Celan, Bruce Springsteen, Marie Howe, Walt Whitman, and many others--to illuminate, comfort, and help to express her sorrow. Some chapters are reflections on friendships and family relationships in the context of a chronic and worsening illness. Some consider making peace with what life has dealt, and others value intentionally reworking it. Not written to suggest easy solace, this powerful work aims to keep company, as would any individual whose loved one is on a course in which the only way out is through.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374115028
• ISBN13: 9780374115029
• Release Date: April 2006
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.78 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.8" x 1.0" x 5.3"

Customer Reviews

The solace of poems

I never really liked poetry. No, let me correct that. I never understood poetry. Blue Peninsula is an alluring work about poetry that bridges the gap. Madge McKeithen's book is an extraordinary, powerful journey through the author's struggle to cope with her son Ike's undiagnosed, degenerative condition. Throughout the terrible ordeal of Ike's illness, Ms. Mckeithen found solace in the words of others. Poetry became her confidant, her guide, her therapist through an overwhelming labyrinth of painful tests, pointless doctor visits, and inaccurate diagnoses - none of which provided the medical help she so desperately wanted for her son. Gorgeously written in a style that is almost poetic on its own, the chapters of Blue Peninsula are divided into the various issues brought on by Ike's illness: the grief, the frustration, the unbearable anguish a parent endures when she is impotent to stop her child's awful suffering. Most chapters begin with a poem - a poem that carries the reader into the thinking heart of the author. There, through the words of the poets, Ms. Mckeithen discovers another way of perceiving the maddening worlds of sadness, anger, loss, powerlessness. In Blue Peninsula the reader begins to realize that poems are not the secret property of an "intelligensia." Poems are what the poets intended: insights into ourselves and our worlds - they are the shared understandings of our very human lives. Whether the reader identifies with the awareness that comes to Ms. McKeithen through poetry, or whether the reader finds a new, personal wonder in poems, Madge McKeithen's Blue Peninsula is an extraordinary experience.

A book I couldn't put down

Blue Peninsula, its author Madge McKeithen says, "is not about resolution, but about connection." McKeithen turns to poetry to make some kind of sense of the chaos that has engulfed her world since her son Ike was diagnosed with a degenerative, but unnamed, illness nine years ago. The poems include favorites that I too might have chosen--Whitman's "A Noiseless Patient Spider" and Rilke's "Sunset"--as well as surprising choices that taught me deeper ways to think about the griefs and complexities of life--poems, for example, by Alan Michael Parker, Kenneth Koch, and Carl Phillips. One of the most moving, especially in the context of Ike's illness, is Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art." But it's not just the poetry. It's McKeithen's honesty, her skill as a writer, and her determination to tell the story that had to be told--that's what makes this a book I couldn't put down until I read it all the way through.

Grief, poetry and courage in a wonderfully readable book.

In this amazing book, Madge McKeithen not only uses the poetry she loves for her own comfort, but to help inform her own understanding of a life that has broken off from the one she intended to live. Her son, Ike, is ill. No one knows what to call the illness, no one can predict its duration nor offer treatment. A mother alone in the wilderness of emotions and yet stuck in the daily grind of obligations, work, and relationships in the face of the dreadful, terrifying illness of her child. McKeithen's book is astounding and courageous, beautiful and fresh.

Breathtaking and fierce

Blue Peninsula is an intimate, thoughtful, and breathtakingly fierce book. McKeithen faces down a subject that must pain her heart every day - her oldest son's illness - and finds balance and delight contemplating poetry by authors as diverse as Sharon Olds, D.H. Lawrence and e.e. cummings. McKeithen writes that "poems... lend themselves to fragmentary reading and re-reading," and encourages readers to dip in and out of Blue Peninsula that same way. I couldn't help but read the book straight through. Blue Peninsula will stay with me as a compass for a very long time.

not to get over, only to bear grief

Madge McKeithen writes: "How much I need someone to know that the well is deep, that its substance is grief, that the water we drink is black, that when I am down there, I cannot breathe, and that I am screaming, screaming that I had wanted something else." Yet every page of Blue Peninsula witnesses McKeithen rising from the bottom of the well, discovering poetry as a rope to climb, to knot, to unravel and reweave. The author begins each chapter by quoting from a poem that has helped to leaven her grief. For example, T. S. Eliot, from "East Coker," Four Quartets: ". . . the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing" McKeithen's son suffers from an illness that can not be named, solved, or recovered from. As I read this beautiful book, the author's grief, her losses, allow me to better bear mine.