Year of the Wasp review: Joel Deane's poetic response to a sudden stroke

POETRY
Year of the Wasp
JOEL DEANE
HUNTER, $19.95

Speechwriter, lecturer, journalist, poet, novelist. Joel Deane was a person using language with apparently effortless facility, until in 2012 he suffered a stroke. Nothing could show us the fragility of our burnished and belaboured selfhood more starkly than a stroke. A tiny clot, a few moments without oxygen for a few square inches of grey matter, and all language, sense, dignity may evaporate.

Year of the Wasp tells the story of Deane's furious, almost atavistic struggle to maintain and reclaim his place in the world. It tells it in a series of poetic jolts and visions, appropriately, because the rage and bewilderment he experienced would only be flattened and dissipated in prose. From the outside there is a tendency to think of the stroke victim as quietly, helplessly, waiting for the power to come back on, perhaps, like Jean-Dominique Bauby, ruminating in lambent, elegant prose the while. Deane tells us, performs for us, the truth.

Rather than enforced somnolence, there is a blazing sunlit plain, an Armageddon in which all the powers of myth and imagination clash, barely audible over the wasp that has invaded his every thought. "He prayed / for rain but the heavens let fall / Tithonus instead, / whose every atom was transfigured into a wasp." Tithonus, that immortal, desiccated insect, victim of a god's vindictiveness, not destroyed but made mad.

His hospital stay is both bleak and peppered with quiet benisons and quizzical explorations, as he experiences, or experiments with, the notions his brain tries and discards on its way back to him. Is the wasp a thing in and out of him, "that performs a pig latin liturgy / on the tabernacle / that is his tongue" or is it Deane himself, flailing and whining for expression?

It's a slow, lonely business, and a perversely precise one. "Such is the monotony of punctuation. / Because when it rains / it rains. / Because when it is dry / it is dry. / Because the run on sentence / of the horizon / is a page / that can only be turned."

Like myth, or religion, there's a sense of it all being the only story available to explain the many terrible facts of experience: he conveys graphically what it was like, and from our safe distance we can hardly argue. We can supply our own facts, but only his experience counts. His impressive armoury of genres is used to full effect in Year of the Wasp, especially in the breathtaking opening section. It makes an argument, tells a story, tries to illumine, using all the tools and allusions available.

After this the book opens out: the poet looks at the world anew, not finding any great comfort in it, yet feeling a helpless tenderness towards it. As so often in poetry recently, a fox appears as a touchstone, evoking both guilt and pity, but also wonder.