A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function: Poems and Paintings

By Eric Gansworth

Echoing the muscular rhythms of the heart beat, the poems in this stunning collection alternate between contraction and expansion. Eric Gansworth explores the act of enduring, physically, historically, and culturally. A member of the Haudenosaunee tribe, Gansworth expresses the tensions experienced by members of a marginalized culture struggling to maintain tradition within a much larger dominant culture. With equal measures of humor, wisdom, poignancy, and beauty, Gansworth’s poems mine the infinite varieties of individual and collective loss and recovery. Fourteen paintings punctuate his poetry, creating an active dialogue between word and image steeped in the tradition of the mythic Haudenosaunee world. A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function is the most recent addition to Gansworth’s remarkable body of work chronicling the lives of upstate New York’s Indian communities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Dec 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9780815656265

Eric Gansworth

Eric Gansworth, Sˑha-weñ na-saeˀ, (Onondaga, Eel Clan) is a writer and visual artist who was born and raised at the Tuscarora Nation. A professor of English, his work has been supported by the National Book Critics Circle, the Lannan Foundation, the Saltonstall Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Arne Nixon Center, the Virginia Piper Center, and The Seaside Institute among other institutions.

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Reviews for A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function

[abigailadams26 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Poetry, I feel, is something that should be approached with great caution. Its ability to worm its way past all our pre-conceptions, to navigate through defenses which seem so impregnable that we have forgotten to think of them as defenses, make it dangerous. I have never been entirely sure whether this is owing to its fluidity of form - that it is not required to move in a linear fashion - or to the fact that it evokes a response through a process of association whose workings are not always immediately apparent. However that may be, the unsuspecting reader sometimes finds herself in for a surprise...And so it was that I found myself unexpectedly moved to tears late one evening, staring blindly out the train window at the scenery rushing past. There I sat, Eric Gansworth's A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function in my lap - a title I don't fully understand, containing poems I don't really understand, written by a man I'll most likely never meet (or understand) - and the tears just started rolling silently down my face. At a complete loss to understand the overwhelming sense of loss and grief rolling through me, the deep sense of connection I suddenly felt, to the larger world, and to a stranger with whom I share little, I did something I have not done in a long time... I picked up a pen and paper, and began furiously scribbling a poem of my own...Gansworth, a member of the Onondaga nation, writes of life on and off the reservation, of the death of his older brother and the death of John Lennon, and of betrayal - cultural, personal, and bodily - and his words either leap right off the page at me, or seem curiously mute. Like the author, I have no idea what voice trees use to speak to young Mohawk men - I hardly know in what voice the author speaks to me. But when I am able to hear him, I am transfixed. Consider the following excerpt from This Is Also Just to Say:and thoughWilliam Carlos Williams didnot know you or meor the way I wantedto give you the worldhe knew of the failureswithin any lifethat we are incapableof being what we shouldbe for othersand can onlygive away these fragmentsof our desires stoppingshort again like measuringspoons falling, catching light,and shining ontheir way down.Or the following, from Are These the Moments Eastman Was Thinking Of?:And here you arefifteen years beforeon the nights shortly after youarrived home, shouting for your rifleevery morning at 3:00 A.M. and on the daysdistributing the hats you broughtwith you across the world, lettingus play with them but keeping their historiesmute as you pose all of usour eyes hidden beneaththe brims' shadows on the frontporch and I wonder, if you havethe urge to mail them backacross the world, addressthem to that pieceof you left behind in the jungles(where it rained every day for a year)that none of us even knows is missing.Addendum: Six months after writing the review above, I finally stumbled upon an understanding of the strength of my reaction to Gansworth's work. Shortly before picking up this collection, in May of 2008, my childhood home burnt to the ground. Although I hadn't lived in that house for many years, its destruction raised all manner of complicated and contradictory memories and feelings, not least of which was the sense (a persistent theme in my adult life) of my past slipping away from me. It may seem difficult to credit that I didn't make the connection before, but one of Gansworth's poems addresses the fiery destruction of his childhood home, and I cannot believe that this is unrelated to my (at the time) inexplicable feelings of grief, when reading it. Why did it take me so long to discover this connection? Well, I imagine that I wasn't ready, at the time I was reading A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function, to really examine my feelings about the fire that destroyed that beautiful old house on the hill. If you'd asked me then, I probably would have professed (very sincerely) little more than casual sadness. But although I wasn't entirely privy to the contents of my own heart, Gansworth's words still spoke to me, in a language I understood on a deeper level. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: poetry is damn sneaky! It's dangerous! That must be why I read it so infrequently...