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

Madge McKeithen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 4, 2006

"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 of Blue 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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The stiffening of McKeithen's eldest son Ike's legs was the first symptom of an undiagnosable disease that would gradually debilitate the 14-year-old with ever-worsening maladies: brain atrophy, dementia and blood abnormalities (though he's still alive). McKeithen, a former teacher, researcher and editor, renders the first eight years of her life strained by Ike's illness; she watches Ike's physical pains increase and social abilities decline, worries over her other son's reaction, loses connections with friends and alters plans for Ike's future (her husband isn't mentioned much). More significantly, the book chronicles McKeithen's love affair with poetry. Each chapter opens with a poem from an eclectic range of bards to whom the author looks for answers: Paul Celan, Emily Dickinson, George McDonald, Walt Whitman. Some put words to emotions that feel indescribable; some provide guidance unattainable elsewhere; some propose hope in the most dire moments. Dissecting the poems as meticulously as she does her son's disease, McKeithen finds the multiplicity in poetry enables her to shift her perspective and approach reality from different angles. For instance, poetry's permission to elude a singular meaning comforts her anxiety over Ike's fate and excuses the lack of explanation for his illness. Readers will come away reminded of poetry's powerful ability to enlighten personal struggles. (May)
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Review

"A mother with a passion for poetry, Madge McKeithen shows us by example how to find comfort in verse as she lives with the agonizing burden of her son’s mysterious illness. In her words and those of others, she reveals a creative way to bear the pain of unresolved loss and grief. Poignantly, she finds strength and resiliency as poetry offers the solace of some truth when the ambiguities of life cannot." —Pauline Boss, author of Ambiguous Loss and Loss, Trauma and Resilience

"Madge McKeithen treats poetry as what Kenneth Burke calls ‘equipment for living.’ Poems become her abiding companions as she lives through and confronts her son’s devastating unnamed illness. Blue Peninsula is a deeply moving book that, like good poetry itself, disturbs and consoles." —Edward Hirsch, author of Poet’s Choice

"’After great pain,’ Emily Dickinson wrote, ‘a formal feeling comes.’ And after the great pain of her son’s grievous illness invaded Madge McKeithen’s life, the formal grace of poetry came to her—or she to it. In that turning to poetry she has given us an extraordinary document of human solidarity and uncommon courage. We are always glad of a great poet in our midst. But it may be rarer still to find a great reader of it, to see embodied in a life the reason poetry matters at all. In her modest, steadfast encounter with individual poems set against the harrowing downward spiral of her son’s life, McKeithen becomes what every writer longs for—the dreamed of ‘dear reader’ that literature lives for. Out of such pain to have fashioned such a heartening book—a remarkable achievement." —Patricia Hampl, author of I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory

"BLUE PENINSULA is a sequence of meditations on poems not by a literary critic but by a mother who is fighting despair over her young son’s bewildering and protracted sickness. Madge McKeithen tries on these poems—ranging from John Clare to Diane Ackerman—like garments to fit the changing shape of her sorrows, and she holds onto each one to keep herself from falling into the well of grief. Here—let there be no doubt-- poetry makes something happen." —Billy Collins

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (April 4, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374115028
• ISBN-13: 978-0374115029
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,508,645 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars not to get over, only to bear grief, April 12, 2006

By 

Carol Peters (Charleston, SC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Blue Peninsula: Essential Words for a Life of Loss and Change (Hardcover)

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.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Grief, poetry and courage in a wonderfully readable book., April 20, 2006

By 

gloriana "gloriana" (bookworld) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Blue Peninsula: Essential Words for a Life of Loss and Change (Hardcover)

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.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A book I couldn't put down, May 13, 2006

By 

Susan Meyers "poet" (Summerville, SC United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Blue Peninsula: Essential Words for a Life of Loss and Change (Hardcover)

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.