Book Review: Fragmentaton

By Sean O’Connor
Published by Alba Publishing
Uxbridge, United Kingdom
2021, Paperback, 82 pp.
ISBN: 978-1-910185-41-1
€15.00
Ordering Information

Reviewed by Patricia Prime

In his new collection, Fragmentation, Sean O’Connor takes the reader on a journey of uncertainty. Through haibun, haiku, and zuihitsu, he explores the dynamics of illness, dementia, and death—most poignantly that of his father—and offers personal stories conveying loss, philosophical acceptance, and compassion. These are works to be enjoyed for their music and resonance, but more importantly they are opportunities for us to reconsider our individual and collective preconceptions about people’s backgrounds, appearances, and lives: How open are we to the humanity of others?

The book, divided into three sections, opens with a series of haibun about his father’s decline into dementia. That initial section is titled “Fraying”—a word that perhaps describes not just the father’s state of mind, but also the son’s nerves as he comes to terms with his father’s dementia and approaching death. In the first haibun, “Windows,” we meet the father after he has just suffered a stroke:

He is seated in his local pub where he had gone for help when he felt something wrong. His left arm is limp. A paramedic asks me to confirm that the left side of his face is drooped. He looks startled and helpless and there is an atmosphere of unstated fear and concern among the bar’s patrons. Among his friends.

speeding ambulance
through its tinted windows
a waning moon

From there, O’Connor goes on to explore his father’s fragmenting existence. The poet’s love and compassion for his father is evident, his stories personal and heartfelt—they’re like listening to tales told by a friend. Informed by his own background as a psychiatric nurse, the author honestly and openly reveals both the frailties of the parent as well as his own indecision, mistakes, and heartbreak. The lengthy haibun “Sundown” focuses on O’Connor’s visits at the time of day that’s most disorienting to dementia patients:

It is easier and more pleasant for me to visit my father during the day than in the evening. He is more settled then, likely to engage in at least partially coherent conversation. There is a kind of rationale to what he says then, although it does not withstand much scrutiny. He can remember the names of some of the nurses and care workers, the ones who tend to him most, but for others he can only say what they do, not who they are. His physiotherapist, who is very tall, he refers to as ‘The Long One,’ and in a loud voice due to his hearing impairment he calls the boss of the unit ‘The Big Fat One.’

…

Evening visits are very different, and this evening is the worst so far. He gives out to me as I arrive, wanting to know what kept me and why I had not visited for such a long time. He paces around his room and looks worried and tired. HIs fly is open and so are some of the buttons of his shirt. I manage to get him to sit down and hand him one of his hearing aids. He fumbles with items on the table and eventually opens his glasses case and puts the hearing aid into it. I say nothing.

There’s also guilt. In “Solitude,” O’Connor visits his father after an absence of three days. His father immediately shows him of tea mug full of the blood-red urine he’s been passing. When O’Connor questions the nurse, she confirms the coloration is due to antibiotics.

‘Imagine,’ she says, ‘he waited three days for you to come in so that he could tell someone!’

I imagine, and feel the wrench of guilt for not making time to visit him for those three days. I imagine too his feelings of worry, his sense of isolation.

Cross the car park to the rear of the dementia unit, cattle grazing nearby, I stop.

this April sky
no birds, no planes, no cloud
its gaping emptiness

And in “Not For Resus,” when O’Connor speaks to the doctor about his father’s situation, he is confronted by the ultimate loss he will eventually have to face:

He said that because I’m a qualified nurse he would speak to me with candour. He added medical terminology to his frankness so that instead of my father having a stroke, he suffered a right lateral cardiovascular accident. As the explanation progressed, this became C.V.A.

In the end he said he would speak to my father about a not for resuscitation policy. Further CVAs, he pointed out, would significantly reduce his quality of life. Given that I am next of kin, he would get back to me at the appropriate time for me to sign the NFR.

He paused to gauge my reaction as I looked at the white wall behind him.

doctor’s calendar
a sheen of May sunlight
the dates obscured

The is serious stuff written with a light hand. There are also big philosophical questions here—our place in the world, our responsibility toward others, how to persevere in the face of adversity—as O’Connor probes the uncertainty of his father’s situation and searches for answer. One such answer in part can be found in the final haibun of this section, “Strive.” After his father has his stroke, O’Connor visits him at the rehab unit and the pair go to a café for tea.

On our way back we stop by a river, its banks overgrown, a tidy orchard on the other side,
for the time being

the swerve and swoop of swallows—
through apple blossoms

He points to something in the river.

‘Look at that,’ he says, ‘do you see that? That’s what I’m talking about, you have to strive.’

His arm is raised, urging me to look.

a fallen tree
thin branches pointing skyward
their fresh green sprouts

In the next section, “The Past in the Present,” O’Connor offers episodes from his own past that show how he and others have striven to deal with illness and loss. In this section, death is never far away. He writes about a man with cancer, a friend killed in a car accident, a victim of a drug overdose, an exotic lady with dementia. In “The Vegetable Option,” his father reappears—perhaps pre-stroke, although his decline is already visible:

My father is seventy-eight today. Every year I bring him for dinner on his birthday. Dinner in the middle of the day. He is a countryman. This year he looks different.

his chest shrinking
it is too big for him now
my father’s jacket

The section ends with an emotional cry of loss from the poet himself:

Rising

starless sky—
pouring into loneliness
the foghorn’s moan

At the Point of Ayre a heaving sea, cold and black. In waves thundering ashore, rolling rocks clatter and clank. The God of Water roars with delight at the triumph of solitude. The Wind God too, rises up in song, and in the singing of the shoving wind a cry is carried from beyond the dunes, the searching calls of my father, who has lost me.

I turn and call to him, lean into a scream, a scream carried out and over the icy sea, where no-one but the Gods themselves, can hear.

From here O’Connor eases the reader into the final section, “This Side of Dying,” in which he introduces people faced with their own frailty and mortality. In “Holy Island,” for instance, O’Connor spends time with a dying friend, and in the haiku finds an apt metaphor for those high points of our lives and memories that we wish could be held onto forever:

The edge of Lough Derg, shortly after daybreak. Over there, Holy Island. Mist in distant trees. Standing there with my dying friend. Final stage. Two seasons to live—at most.

These past few days he is feeling well. Rises early. Makes the most of every day. Every minute.

The water flat calm. Stoop down. Pick up. Arm back. Release.

the arc of a stone
that moment as it peaks
that moment

Elsewhere, he tells of how people deal with their own illnesses and losses. There’s the women with Alzheimer’s who hands out a calling card naming her illness; an Irish wake where mourners eat, drink, and celebrate the deceased; the author’s own prostate problems that ensure he will never be a father. And in the lengthy haibun “Last Christmas,” the poet sits in a cafe next to a couple and their two children, a boy and a girl. “The kids are running about,” O’Connor writes:

The boy has a toy gun. He shoots plastic darts with rubber suckers at his father. The couple get him to stop. Both kids told to sit down, and they do, the boy in the seat nearest mine He wheezes a little.

His mother explains that he has cancer of the lung, reciting his condition in medicalese, and gives a dire prognosis.

‘He has six months to live,’ she says.

‘It could be more,’ says the girl.

I look at the boy. He has dropped a plastic police badge that came with his gun, and he points at it. I pick it up from under my seat. As I hand it to him, I notice his sister has a new set of paintbrushes. I ask her if she likes to paint.

‘Love it,’ she says.

The boy asks his father if it is time to leave yet. It is. They gather their things and get ready for the cold.

“Happy New Year,’ we all say as they leave.

slow falling light
melting on the window
a single snowflake

The piece moves naturally between the dire situation and the carefree attitude of the children, and in O’Connor’s telling there’s a deep humanity present. The philosophical implications of these events are vast, and the collection doesn’t shy away from the many complicated issues surrounding illness, disease, death and acceptance. In all cases, though, O’Connor explores those issues with openness, honesty, and compassion.

The final haibun, “Baby,” recounts what must have one of O’Connor’s last visits with his father. This is now the time of Covid, and in the “Covid Hub” father and son are separated by a Perspex screen. On his father’s side is a creche where “a crowd of kitsch figurines circle baby Jesus”:

Just as we’re out of time, he reaches into the crib and pats the head of one of the Magi. Then he presses his finger on the belly of baby Jesus.

He turns to me and says:

‘I’ll never forget it. You were a tiny baby. They said you were going to die. They all said you would die, but you didn’t. You didn’t.

I am sanitizing my hands as he is wheeled away and I hear him say:

‘That’s a son of mine you know. A son of mine.’

this fragile life—
snow-loaded clouds
slippy underfoot

It is indeed a fragile life, but the bonds that hold father and son together remain as strong as ever. The haibun is a fitting end to the collection, noting, as it does so gently, those fragments we have shored against our ruins.

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About the Reviewer

Patricia Prime is co-editor of the NZ haiku journal Kokako. She is the articles editor for contemporary haibun online and also a reviewer for Atlas Poetica, Takahe, and other journals.