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Show CHRYSALIS pAGE 1 58 leg isn't getting a little sensitive - and doesn't it look a little different?" • • I have just discovered L. E. Sissman, through reading Violet Weingarten's Intimations of Mortality - (a "testament of courage and dignity, of life prevailing over death." A fine book - alas! published after her death.) Sissman, dying of Eddie's illness, Hodgkin's Disease, was a poet, and had been a reviewer for The New Yorker, and wrote a monthly column for The Atlantic. The book, Hello, Darkness, contains 134 of his poems, which the jacket says were "inspired" by his illness. "There is a powerful rage to live. . ." says the jacket, "even in the face of death." There is also a lot of "suffering of an unpicturesque kind - the kind that takes place in hospitals - which Sissman had a remarkable gift for picturing." Ah,yes. I remember well "the pinpoint of the least syringe," and "the buttered catheter," and the IVs lisp and drip," and the "malignant plum" that "turns out to end in -oma." And, yes, he too saw forever after through an "invisible new veil of finity." Forever after being something akin to ten years or so. Given |