Pen Reid: InValid*****
‘Our song began by a loch…the fish lay still listening to our words’ (Awakening)
InValid, artist and poet Pen Reid’s new pamphlet, tells the story of a marriage – hers. It begins with the first meeting, with that dazzling discovery of new worlds, new beauty, new spiritual 
freedom (no longer ‘subjugated into parent pleasing’), new physical joy;
‘my tentative shuffle admiring the way
your hips tucked in neatly:’
Pen’s finely crafted words take us all back to that first rapture. Things change after that for most of us – but for Pen and her family they have changed in a particularly drastic way. After her husband’s diagnosis with the degenerative disease multiple sclerosis, Pen began writing poems to find a way through the family’s experience, something that she has achieved with awe-inspiring skill;
‘Poetry has provided me with a voice to express the unspeakable’
Here in The Whole Works’ cosy Old Town sitting room, Pen’s readings are accompanied by Emma Scott’s moving violin music; the two are in perfect harmony, Emma’s playing reflecting the various moods in the poems. When Pen talks of a robin, Emma’s violin fills the room with bird song; as leaves fall the music becomes slow and wistful.
Pen lays bare the simple truths of a life with MS, but she also finds hope in the smallest details. Her poems follow the seasons of the year, and the seasons of her marriage. In Autumn she is
‘…..vivified by
the vulgarity of
the chrysanthemum…’
but also wistful, ‘longing for the return of his summer.’ In Fall in the Garden we are not spared her husband’s embarrassment in ending up with his head in a plant pot – but
‘my heart is buoyant
that you are bleeding
and alive.’
It is, of course, not only a partner who is affected by illness. Children have to live in a situation quite different from that of their peers. Pen uses the analogy of water suddenly crashing down over a weir (fabulous, shattering music from Emma), and in We saw bunnies playing below the ramparts she likens her children to rabbits playing on a cliff edge;
‘despite the steep precipice,
they play on’
She desperately wants her daughters to know their father as their father, to understand that he is still the same person;
‘Lengthening your marrow
will not journey you from pain.
Stay with your father’s degeneration;
know love lives not in the physical.’ (Fridge Light)
And after all, they are still children doing childlike things – ‘My daughter stands in her pyjamas/singing to the cat’.
In a particularly poignant moment, Pen goes into her husband’s workshop, picks up some of the curly wood shavings and wears them on her fingers ‘like rings’ (Redundant).
The final poem in this reading Meeting with a tree in a park, embodies all of Pen’s sadness, but also all of her hope; the tree is trapped in the park, but its petals still fall free, nothing can prevent them from flying; ‘My increasing belief that we are never truly trapped’.
‘Invalid’, Pen says, is a label too often applied to ill people, too apt to make them ‘in valid’, unimportant, unheard. A neurologist once told her that ‘grieving is critical to adjustment’, but in this brave and beautiful collection, Pen not only grieves – she validates her husband, their family and the power of love.
InValid is published by Appletree Writers Press and will be available online from Bowdy Kite Books.
Pen will launch InValid at the Scottish Poetry Library, 5 Crichton’s Close, Canongate, at 1.30pm on Saturday 10th September. All welcome.
