DATE: Sunday, September 7, 1997             TAG: 9709040599

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J3   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN

                                            LENGTH:   71 lines

PAIN CAN FIND RELEASE IN POETRY

The watercolor on the cover of the book could, at first glance, be a simple representation of the globe, all green and brown and blue, gathered brightly in a ball.

But closer inspection reveals the image of a faceless figure, curled tightly into a fetal position.

Fierce withdrawal inward becomes the world of a person in pain.

It is the flip side of those whimsical cartoons by James Thurber. He showed comedy beneath the surface of reality. Paul W. Sparks shows agony.

There are not a lot of laughs in his Oh, the Pain of It All (Brandylane, 62 pp., $15). Any humor resident here is sardonic. But the bittersweet humanity imparted by Sparks' pictures and poems packs a punch.

``Some of the poems,'' the author warns, ``may offend some people.''

Which is precisely why they need to be read.

Sparks, 59, earned a Ph.D. in physics from Iowa State, served in the Navy and ran an engineering firm in Northern Virginia. In 1991 he was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia, suffering continuing pain from CLL's consequence - polyneuropathy or nerve degeneration. The father of four and grandfather of five retreated to the Northern Neck with his wife, Penny.

There, combating his cancer and the further isolating upshot of deafness incurred late in life, Sparks undertook a journal that allowed him to express rage, frustration and, ultimately, something else that surpassed them both.

``Damn pain,'' he writes.

These poems and observations are candid, even raw, but what they lack in literary polish is more than made up for in dead-on unflinching veracity. Sparks is unsparing of physicians, family, fate, even God.

He's cranky and he doesn't care.

I don't know, Joe.

Sounds pretty bad to me.

I always thought the doctors knew

Everything, judging from their fee.

Sparks has been on the medic-to-medic treadmill. He has seen the specialists, taken the tests. Heard the endless head-shaking expressions of equivocal bafflement.

Experienced the side effects.

Pills in the morning.

Pills at night.

Pills to calm you

So you don't want to fight.

Nothing worked.

``The pain,'' he writes, ``had become so severe by 1993 that I had to quit working completely and start receiving disability. I can only concentrate for an hour or so on any given thing. During the day I can really only put in two or three hours of activities other than reading or watching TV.''

It's hard to keep straight, just what

Piece of self respect, intelligence,

Savoir faire, man of the world image you are supposed to have

When you're puking on the floor.

He had nausea, migraines, dizziness, cramps, hallucinations, insomnia - treated by Prozac, Amitrimine, Dilantin, Imipramine, Tregenal.

Yes pills, pills, pills, pills.

They pile up tremendous bills.

His body betrays him. CLL, ``the white raptor,'' bears him relentlessly away. But he finds solace in the enduring closeness of his wife and the empathetic camaraderie of a cancer support group.

In the grasp of a hand, the glimpse of an otter in the water, the lambent muse of a moonrise, Sparks acknowledges moments that redeem the long haul.

In his writing, he reaches out to the rest of us under sentence of death:

No longer alone, but

Together and alive. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia

Wesleyan College.

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