On the Level: Poems on living with multiple sclerosis, by Bryan Monte

Author: Bryan Monte. Review by Bob Ward.

What’s it really like living with a permanent disability that confines you to a wheelchair? Bryan Monte is a Quaker who lives in Amsterdam, where he formerly taught English in a university. He suffers from multiple sclerosis (MS), a condition that not only disables you but nags at you incessantly. This is a brave book, in which Monte presents a series of poems that confront head-on the problems that he faces: getting around; enduring pain flickering like flames around his legs; missing out on simple pleasures; being treated as a ‘nobody’; the petty humiliations brought by other people’s insensitivity – especially the last of these. In spare language he speaks directly, on the level, in a plea for understanding on behalf of all those who are similarly afflicted. He affords them a powerful and much-needed voice by asserting their ‘dignity in being’, as Wordsworth would have put it.

This makes for salutary reading. Before his MS developed, Bryan had been a member of the gay community in San Francisco at the height of the AIDS epidemic, which killed many of his friends. Yet the tone here is not remorselessly grim. There is humour, as when he feels sorry for a young doctor lumbered with the task of delivering bad news, then he consoles himself with a wedge of cream cake. His once trim body puts on weight: ‘Welcome home, moonfaced man in the mirror / Whose too-tight clothes and shoes / Finally joined the Salvation Army.’

Beyond that he writes a fine memorial tribute to a doctor friend, Ronald Linder, who died from cancer. In recollection he finds himself: ‘no longer frightened or angry / by my weak legs or forgetful hands / but remembering and honoring / the calm, courageous way / you lived and left’. The book is far from being a catalogue of misery.

Monte tells how a Meeting for Worship in Glasgow spoke to his condition. Hydrotherapy allows for a buoyancy of both body and spirit. There is a deep camaraderie to be found in a group of other disabled people. Best of all he was able to undertake a trip to Trento in Italy, a town from which his ancestors had emigrated to North America. It felt like a homecoming. He located his great-great-grandfather’s grave not far from Lago Maggiore. Afterwards he sat in a café where he felt ‘a cool, lake breeze caress my face / and finally know where I will rest’.

In retirement his principle activity is editing a distinctive international literary magazine, Amsterdam Quarterly (www.amsterdamquarterly.org). Much of this work he conducts in the White Room of the American Book Centre in Amsterdam, where he finds that: ‘Bright sunlight pours in through tall, many paned windows.’

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