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    A Treatment
    A Treatment
    A Treatment
    Ebook112 pages33 minutes

    A Treatment

    By Ann Shenfield

    ()

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    About this ebook

    A Treatment presents a poetic reflection of family trauma in a post-holocaust context, which is grounded in these times. The poems articulate the past as it intersects with the present, as well as the way the present writes over what has been before, both in human and ecological terms. The writing is informed by psychoanalysis, and the aim of the work is to elucidate a version of truth or to touch on something of the ephemeral. A Treatment is about questions of identity and speaks to the frailty of both the human and physical world in all their incomprehensibility.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBlack Inc. Books
    Release dateFeb 7, 2023
    ISBN9781743822906
    A Treatment
    Author

    Ann Shenfield

    Ann Shenfield’s poetry has received various awards including the Judith Wright Poetry Prize for You Can Get Only So Close On Google Earth, which was also a finalist for the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards. Her animated films have also received prizes and screened at numerous festivals including selection to the Official Competition at Berlin

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      Book preview

      A Treatment - Ann Shenfield

      1.

      A treatment

      In 1938 in fascist Italy the man credited

      with initiating electroconvulsive therapy

      —Ugo Cerletti—observes pigs in an abattoir

      being stunned before their slaughter

      My mother is in pre-war Poland

      the family haven’t yet fled to Russia

      She still has all the hopes

      and dreams of a nine-year-old

      Meanwhile Ugo discerns that stunned

      pigs appear less agitated

      He surmises they accept their demise

      more amenably when shocked

      And he thinks, why not?

      besides he’s already tried a version on dogs

      Placing cables in their mouths and anuses

      but this only leads to cardiac arrest

      This is how some of it evolved

      and me, a dog lover and vegetarian

      Trying to piece together a mother

      grieving her husband’s sudden heart failure

      Later they will notice that shock

      treatment messes with a person’s affect

      How it no longer matches the emotions

      think vacancy for tears, laughter for anguish

      Though I worry, might this

      also be true for pigs?

      They diagnosed my mother’s guilt

      and grief as depression

      Then stunned her to a silence

      the Italian died a year before her shocks

      The Sorbonne gave him an honorary degree

      my mother came home but didn’t properly return

      Sophia does not hold up the world

      like Atlas

      she is only an appendage, a suffix to philo—

      Incomplete in her own terms, almost wisdom

      but without mythic status

      Still, I know that wisdom walks

      with frostbitten toes across tundras

      To places with names that no longer exist

      where at a border crossing she prevents a shooting

      Let’s say this act saves the entire group

      in that snowed-in Slavic nowhere

      Only discoverable now in outdated maps

      a story, part fairytale, or almost oral history

      Except she never spoke of it, or of how

      as an ex-school mistress she would accept

      Whatever work was delegated

      like at the factory peeling potatoes

      While wisdom grieved a husband

      before she would learn of the others

      The twenty-four who tapered

      into two—this mother and her child

      Sophia does not hold up the world

      though she sends food parcels

      To her one surviving nephew in a gulag

      —parcels that enable him to endure

      If you save a life, you save the whole world

      my people are fond of saying

      Though I hesitate to mention Sophia’s plan

      it was only that her child who’d become my mother

      Was afraid of water, that they didn’t wave

      or, that is, drown

      Besides, in those circumstances

      who wouldn’t consider suicidal ideation wise?

      This world is always being held up by Atlas

      even if Sophia, in Polish it’s Zofia, realises me

      * written in response to Damon O’Brien’s Atlas Carried the World

      On seeing a woman who resembles me in a photo of the liberation of

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