A Life Lived Backwards

Mental health professionals are just starting to talk about and treat the long-term effects of the trauma that emergency workers - emergency medical technicians, fire fighters, first responders, emergency room personnel - live with every day.

Advanced Emergency Medical Technician (AEMT) Mark Creaven's therapy has been writing poetry. And he writes good poetry - at times lyrical, at times harsh and painfully evocative, always honest.

Mark's poetry is not just about the...
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Mental health professionals are just starting to talk about and treat the long-term effects of the trauma that emergency workers - emergency medical technicians, fire fighters, first responders, emergency room personnel - live with every day.

Advanced Emergency Medical Technician (AEMT) Mark Creaven's therapy has been writing poetry. And he writes good poetry - at times lyrical, at times harsh and painfully evocative, always honest.

Mark's poetry is not just about the things he's seen in his long career as a first responder. As he says, " When you're not in an ambulance, you still have your life to live. Loves and losses, deaths and births."

The result is an intimate chronicle of one man's life - and of the way of life in a vanishing corner of rural New England where life is as harsh as the winters.

This is poetry that will speak to emergency workers everywhere, and to any man who has reached late middle age carrying his own burdens of love, loss, and loneliness.

Critical Acclaim for A Life Lived Backwards...

"Mark Creaven's new collection of poems, A Life Lived Backwards, is a starkly lyrical memorial of the harshness of life in the last, rural frontier of Vermont known as the Northeast Kingdom.

As an emergency medical technician, a friend, a neighbor, and a caring human being, Mr. Creaven has seen it all: suicide, unspeakable highway wrecks, family violence, livelihoods going up in flames along with house and barns. Yet, in the end, A Life Lived Backwards is a tribute to our ability, through love, not just to endure, but to transcend, just about the worst horrors imaginable."

"Shelley wrote in 1821, "In a time of violence, the task of poetry is in some way to reconcile us to our world and to allow us a measure of tenderness and grace with which to exist."

Creaven's work A Life Lived Backwards offers the reader such grace, creating something from the proverbial nothing of life's lacunae in compassion juxtaposed with indifference.

Nearly two hundred years after Shelley's A Defence of Poetry, Creaven's words hold lyrical ground, offering fragile fortitude and tender, tenuous redemption".

Through a full and honorable life that has included service in the military, mental health and emergency medical services Mark Creaven has seen more than his share of the suffering, death and loss that most people carefully protect themselves from experiencing. In the first chapter of A Life Lived Backwards he gives the reader a rare glimpse into the occasional joy and frequent trauma experienced by emergency workers.

As an EMS and ER veteran I have become perhaps too numb to traumatic scenes but the jarring imagery of Creaven's poems ripped off my protective layers and lay bare my own unhealed wounds. The concise, evocative and emotionally difficult poems serve their purpose to reader and perhaps writer. Someone must treat the dead and dying and these heroes bear a heavy burden for society.

The subsequent chapters contain some lighter passages but continue the theme of devastating loss, still painful to read and effectively exposing my own fears and losses.

There is no refuge here from the reality that people and things die, suffering happens, buildings rot and burn, relationships fail and we all die alone in some sense. Whether redemption is found is up to the reader, but Mark Creaven's important work gives voice to the traumas that fill sleepless nights of millions.