Review: Standing on my Shadow, by Serie Barford

To Serie Barford, cancer is as perpetual as Chornobyl – both discrete instances and ongoing disasters. To this effect, Barford bookends Standing on my Shadow with radiation, beginning with her travels to ‘The Exclusion Zone’, and ending with her journeys to ‘Building 8’, where she ‘Returned to the room with the radioactive warning signs’ and ‘received a radiotherapy tattoo. An unsolicited / black dot near my heart’. But none of these parallels are neat, or simple, and their significance ripples out into the book. 

The poems on the author’s cancer treatments are imbued with these personal, cultural, and political ripples. In ‘Blood patterns made visible’, Barford reflects: ‘Cancer inhabits my blood. This [radiotherapy tattoo] is tinctured. Visible. / A coordinate for lasers. Proof of colonisation. Warfare’ . These themes are laced throughout the collection, from the recording of human connection in waiting rooms (where topics vary from tattoos to earrings to utu to angels) down to diction – for example, consistently using the Ukrainian spellings of words rather than the Russian ones (hence: ‘Chornobyl’). Resistance, in a multitude of forms, could very well be the collection’s central theme.

Barford’s own, beautiful voice comes across strongly in the poems, yet this is a collection of many voices. Aspects of her body take on lives of their own, as they are under siege from cancer and medicine. The third section, titled ‘The hair issue’, contends with what it means for Barford’s hair taken from for the sake of her life, when this ‘propels me into grief’ because ‘my hair and head are tapu’. Grappling with synthetic wigs and the idea of wearing another, anonymous human’s ‘donat[ed] trauma’, Barford exposes a deep discomfort with this mandated part of chemotherapy. Speaking to a similar harrowing experience, she recounts ticking the ‘Body Tissue Return’ box, and not receiving her body tissue until she’s sent ‘a flotilla of emails’ asking ‘Where’s my breast? / Where’s my susu? / Where’s my boob?’. Intensive medical intervention can be disembodying, but through this collection, Barford re-embodies herself.

If a poetry collection could be held as a piece of empirical evidence, I would contend that Standing on my Shadow proves the power of being poetically-minded. Barford’s poetic mind has been intent on detail throughout her illness – it has sharply observed empathy, connection, delicious tiny details of humanity. She offers these to us, wrapped carefully in exquisite words, less like a gift, and more like a call to action to pay attention: be at home in yourself, and fight what needs fighting.

Sickle moons

Last night I dreamed angels plummeted to Earth.

Lost wings. Feathers flew from furculae, small

darts with terrestrial targets.

I woke to black crescents sprinkling my pillow.

Tiny sickle moons on white Egyptian linen.

Eyelashes.