Words for Elephant Man

Maggie Helwig was a freelance writer and Professor of Pre-Industrial Arts, UPRPU, Peterborough, Ontario.

This, Kenneth Sherman’s third book of poetry, is based on the life of Joseph Merrick, the nineteenth century “Elephant Man” — a man so hideously deformed that the physician who was responsible for him in the later part of his life hoped at first that he was an imbecile so that he would not be aware that “his position was unthinkable.” But Merrick was of normal, perhaps unusual, intelligence, and keenly sensitive. Now he has been taken as a subject by an equally sensitive poet, who — apart from a few quotations from sources — speaks throughout the book as Merrick’s voice. The result is profound and moving.

Merrick was, himself, a very religious man, and it is the religious aspect of his affliction that Sherman particularly explores. In language often strongly biblical, he incisively probes the issue of “thy suffering servant... the articulation of the New Age,” the Word made flesh in a time when words are becoming meaningless. And thus the battle of man and God becomes, as well, the battle of the poet with absurdity, and, finally, each man’s struggle for meaning.

But the individual, Merrick, is never lost to sight. He emerges convincing and real, and his pain, his frustrated love, are palpable.

At times Sherman’s staccato, short lines seem to need some variation; the prosody is perhaps not as unforced as the play of thought and feeling. But this is a relatively small point; as a whole, Words for Elephant Man is a striking and important success.