Small Rain *****

Small Rain by Garth Greenwell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Who would expect to be so completely absorbed by the stream of consciousness thoughts of a man trapped in a hospital bed threatened by a puzzling and serious vascular medical condition early in the epidemic when medical cautions abound (limited visitors) and PPE is at a premium. The narrator/patient is a college poetry teacher and, to my delight, mentions a handful of poets especially Gerald Oppen and Geoffrey Hill, Frank Bidart, Sylvia Plath and a Valeri Petrov Bulgarian translation done by Richard Wilbur. I was in my element. His husband is a Spaniard and the two of them speak English and Spanish on alternate days. The book also treats the myriad indignities of the wounded body, the magnification of time as one awaits meds, the helplessness and hunger. When the poet patient is finally untethered and released, awaiting a ride home, he says to himself: "Try to remember this, I admonished myself, since I knew it would fade. All happiness fades, or does for me, misery digs deep gouges in memory, sets the course of the self, I sometimes think, it lays down the tracks one is condemned to move along, whereas happiness leaves no trace...Why should only suffering be a vale of soul-making, why shouldn't the soul be made of this moment, too, this unremarkable moment, remember this." And his book does just that, leaving a record of not only his suffering but of kindness, love and poetry.

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