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[Book Review Editor's Note:  Edward Dorn (1929-1999) was born in Illinois, and taught at Idaho State University from 1961-65; following this sojourn in the Intermountain West he taught at the University of Essex in England, Northeastern Illinois University, Kent State University, and the University of Colorado at Boulder.  Though his time in Pocatello was fairly brief, he made a tremendous mark on the poets and poetry of this area, and edited the rather infamous journal Wild Dog during that time.  A widely published and influential teacher, he also edited Rolling Stock which was issued between 1981 and 1991 from Boulder.]

As I read Edward Dorn’s posthumous publication, Chemo Sábe, I am struck by how his poetry informs my experience of this crisp February day.  There is something in his writing that touches the mind like lightly frosted air inhaled and exhaled – thin wisps of breath swallowed by the unsympathetic yet benign blue of a winter sky.  The sun, now playing upon the snow, shines for so few hours – one must appreciate its revelatory power, with which it makes the smooth white surface jump with the complexity of reflection.  

In the work, which spans the last 5 years of the poet’s life and includes poems written both before and after his diagnosis with inoperable pancreatic cancer, he faces, with agnostic vulnerability, the certainty of his own demise, and comments upon the state of the world with “the heightened perception of his own precarious position.”  Dorn’s writing style, which ranges from Spartan brimstone in “Iodine Fire,” to free-ranging rant in “Chemo du Jour,” holds this reader’s attention as though the gaunt, hawkish man, whose piercing gaze you meet upon opening to the title page, were speaking in person.

The first poem in the book, entitled “House Arrest,” was written two years before, and eerily foreshadows, the illness that becomes the subject for the majority of the collection.  In the 23 poems that make up the collection, Dorn mingles humor and tragedy with a steady lightness of hand, displaying the workings of a mind “never blunted by self- pity or remorse,” as described in the book’s introduction by Jennifer Dunbar Dorn. 

Several of Dorn’s poems describe his dance with the drugs that served both pesticidal and painkilling purposes throughout his two-year battle. He comments on the politics of the day, and the end of his, with clarity and vibrancy, offering a vision of “steroidal cognition” through the chemical filter of decadron therapy in “Chemo du Jour: The Impeachment on Decadron.”  In “White Rabbit,” he confronts the metaphysical paradox of being both host and victim to a tumor that will kill him and die with him: “Life for an alien is not any better than it is for the subject.”

Despite the certainty of sharp, unremitting suffering that lies behind the writing, upon reading it one is left with a sense of a serenely calm sadness.  In the book’s final poem, “The Garden of the White Rose,” we see the first mention of mercy, and he asks: “How can I solicit even /a particle of it / for the relief of my singularity.” 

Throughout Chemo Sábe, Dorn speaks of and critiques modern medicine and modern society to reveal a truth that is at times as amusing as it is painful.  I wonder if he had such a comment in mind when he declared that, “Telling the truth will greatly amuse your alien / if you got one.”