Pacemaker

by David Toms

Every time I write about my heart, I write about walking. Every time I write about walking, I write about my heart. What is it like to be born with a congenital heart defect? What does it mean to live knowing your heart will one day fail you? How do you walk without moving a muscle? In Pacemaker, poet David Toms deftly blends creative nonfiction, poetry and diary in an account of resisting, confronting, and living with a rare heart condition. His experience, including his hospitalisation during the Covid-19 pandemic, speaks to all of us in its exploration of what it means to live in a fragile yet resilient body, to walk multiple challenging paths, and to always a find a way to keep moving.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir

154 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 15, 2022

Reviews

[Rosamund Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a series of interconnected vignettes, David Toms explores life with a serious heart condition, alongside his passion for walking. As he says, “Every time I write about my heart, I write about walking. Every time I write about walking, I write about my heart.” Pacemaker begins in Toms’ childhood, explaining his heart condition, and follows Toms on his journey into adulthood. Living as an adult with this condition is uncharted territory, and Toms is forced to forget his own path. Using texts from his family, he also shows the great interruption of Covid within his adult life, and the time he spent close to death in a hospital in his adopted home of Norway.

My own condition is not as serious as Toms’, but I also deal with the daily grind of invisible illness and the ways in which disability intersects with my life. Because of this, parts of Toms book resonated with me so deeply that I struggled to look at them objectively, particularly sections around learning to live with limitations. It’s difficult to write about illness – illness is so often tedium interspersed with periods of intense fear, and it’s hard to evoke that meaningfully for those not experiencing it. But Toms writes richly, capturing the texture of daily life through his descriptions of walking, and intersperses this with the reality of illness. As a society, we generally put the disabled or chronically ill into one box, and the rest of the population into another, but Toms refuses to do that: these boxes are useless, because we are always moving from one place to another. We cannot avoid illness by refusing to look at it, and Toms doesn’t let us get away with this refusal: he places illness within the idea of “health”, and demonstrates how the two things are always intertwined.

Toms is a poet, and his book works as a mixture of prose-poem and memoir. He engages with the white of the page, using the negative space to draw his words into sharp focus. His language is spare and candid: he sketches the beauty of a Norwegian forest, a cabin, or the depersonalization of a hospital room, in spare paragraphs. His simple language went straight to my guts, such as when he pondered questions like, “I worry often about when I will take my last breath, my last words. Our first words, first steps, are remembered well, but what of our final steps? What would you last walk be?”

Though a short book, this isn’t a simple one. It rewards careful study due its refusal to give any easy answers. Like a haiku, it contains a great sense of the expansive within a small space, and Toms’ assured and measured prose guides the reader through the huge spaces of life, sickness and movement. I recommend this.

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first met David Toms as an historian, at a conference in the early 2010s, where he presented work drawn from his doctoral thesis exploring football (soccer) in Munster in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It soon became clear that there were more strings to this young writer’s bow, and he published fine poetry, and as the years went by he became a chum, living in Prague – where I visited a couple of times a year for work – and good company for an outing to the theatre, local pub or eaterie, and more recently near Oslo (a less frequent destination).

Somewhere along the line he mentioned a heart condition, I don’t recall where first but I do remember with fondness a longish conversation one evening in Café Montmartre on Řetězová in central Prague. During this discussion, part of me marvelled at the ordinariness of his discourse, and part of me doffed my cap to those medics whose work meant that we could be there, talking – I’m a generation older than David, and my generation did not survive his condition. Last time I saw him was in Oslo, just before this beautiful marvel of a book completed its path through the publication process in mid 2022….

I’ve sat on this for over a year, partly wanting to dive into a piece of work I was confident would be gorgeous writing (I was right), while part of me not sure I necessarily wanted to know all of this about my chum (I was wrong). Pacemaker is an elegant meditation of growing up and living with a chronic medical condition, on managing that condition as a child and young man – but more it is an exploration of the joys of multiple forms of walking:

“It has been a long winter. I have found myself short of breath. Short of a lot. Life has felt short. My walking has been curtailed. I tried to keep a diary of my walks and it was as abrupt of some of the walks. Here is another attempt.” (p 85)

There is a paradox in the writing – it is both poetic and banally matter-of-fact, often concurrently. It is also, in places, raw, with discussions of fear, of the effect of other diseases – David had an early and ferocious Covid-19 infection, but the more powerful pieces reflect on transience (I loved his discussion of visitor books), and the eloquence of the ways his dog changed the way he walks.

I’m not a big reader of ‘illness books’ – the only other I ever recall reading is Mike Marqusse’s collection of essays The Price of Experience: Writings on Living with Cancer . Too many of them seem like I’m at risk of voyeurism, or that I am supposed to learn life’s lessons (which might be a sign that I have fallen foul of celebrity marketing).

I’m pretty sure that even if didn’t know David, I would have been beguiled by the eloquence of the text, its poetic and richly evocative voice, its advocacy of the beauty of walking (a much under-rated pastime), and its insight to the subtlety of experience. I do know that I wouldn’t have picked it up if I didn’t know him, and I would have been poorer for that. Quite simply, quite marvellous.

[Cornelius Browne · Rating 5 out of 5]

An open-hearted compact masterpiece about a life set in motion by the author's heart at birth working differently to most others - one of those rare books that with tremendous care take the world apart before our eyes, so that the reader sees it all again as if for the first time.

[Sara Aylward-Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunning, beautifully written book that has filled me with wonder and sadness and other words I can't quite find yet.
A real triumph.

[Jen Beaubien · Rating 5 out of 5]

So wonderfully written.

[Émilie Michaud · Rating 4 out of 5]

De la poésie contemporaine que j'ai aimée, yeah! David est né avec une malformation cardiaque et il écrit son corps et ses limitations. C'est beau, c'est court.