Summary:

The poem tells the story of one who travels to the hot springs seeking a cure for his chronic illness/disability. For 25 years the subject faithfully visits what remains of the opulent dream of spa-builders--a bubble that burst for both the entrepreneurs and their visitants. In the nearly deserted town, the poet's character continues to seek relief without success, yet he remains. The writer seems to be asking if it has become the search itself that keeps the sufferer alive; if he were to suddenly be made well perhaps he would lose everything in losing his familiar identity.

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The author of this chapbook of poems is the chaplain of a large geriatric outpatient unit in Iowa City. Her In Strange Places is a series of 23 "poem portraits," each one of them a short narrative that speaks for one of the patients who is "not to be defined by illness and years and deserve(s) to be free of the condescending devaluing attitudes" that the elderly often encounter." (p. 3)

The poems are particularly eloquent in speaking of the progressive losses of aging. For example, there is "At Ninety: Embers of a World," which depicts two elderly persons as they "decompensate in sorrow." (pp. 8-9); and "Of Late I Have Taken to Falling," in which a patient describes her recent falls, but concludes, "I shall not / fall again." (p. 16-17).

Other portraits deal lovingly with an "impressively calm" dying matriarch ("CHF and the Matriarch, p. 6) and "The Good Storyteller" (pp. 18-19), who "wants her life / to begin again / to call her out / to play her part / once more with / cleaner closets / open doors." In "Funeral Plan" (p. 22), we meet an elderly woman carefully considering the magnificent array of flowers she plans to have at her funeral, "no hot house roses please," but great expanses of seasonal flowers: "ditch lilies / apple blossoms / naked ladies . . . " and so forth.

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The 58 year old plastic surgeon who narrates this story has plenty of problems. He drinks too much and his surgical skills are deteriorating. His wife Maya, a neurosurgeon young enough to be his daughter, has a miscarriage not long after her father dies from a brain tumor. The narrator is plagued by an obsession with butterflies.

He seems to have inherited his unnatural interest in these insects from both his father and grandfather. Strangely, the pursuit of butterflies has brought only tragedy to these men. Maya believes her husband's butterfly collection is a curse so she destroys it. Her action seems insufficient to liberate the narrator from the burden of his ancestors. He is convinced that his destiny was dictated by his family years ago.

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This small collection opens with a quotation from Mary Oliver's poem, "The Journey": "And there was a new voice / which you slowly / recognized as your own . . . " These poems reveal a new voice, which in John Wright's case, is perhaps heard best in his pastoral retreat on Decatur Island, one of the smaller San Juan Islands of Puget Sound.

Most of the poems depict scenes from Decatur; for example, the annual community sheep shearing ("The Shepherds"); a glimpse of a young girl crossing a field toward the poet's house carrying "cherry plums" (crab apples, "The Gift"); and a morning spent picking blackberries with his wife in the hills ("The Right Moves").

Other poems arise more purely from the geography of the heart. One of these is called "Praise," in which the poet confesses, "This quiet elation that comes, finally, / At seventy-one . . .

It's something akin to a leaf-bare maple, / Its upraised limbs."

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The first line of this short poem sets the stage: "It is easy to be fascinated with death." The next four lines sketch the play or tableau: "We pretend to prepare," children trying on our parents oversized clothes in front of a mirror and making believe that we are going to go out into the fancy nighttime world of adulthood. But the next line throws open our safety valve, "Yet we trust we are not truly going to dinner." In fact, it's all just a game: the clothes are really too big, our hands are much too small to handle the glasses and silverware, and we are just little kids, after all. [8 lines]

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Born in Newnan, Georgia, and raised in Jackson, Florida, Cary Henderson was the first member of his family to go to college. He eventually earned a Ph.D. from Duke University and with his family, settled into an academic career as a history professor at James Madison University. In 1985, at the age of fifty-five, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.

As his ability to read and write deteriorated, Henderson began using a pocket recorder to tape what he called "the anecdotal career of an Alzheimer's patient" in order to help others "understand the world that they are now forced to live in" (4). His recorded journal spans the fall of 1991 to the summer of 1992. His wife and daughter began the long process of editing his tapes and were ultimately joined in the project by Nancy Andrews, award-winning photographer from The Washington Post, who provided images of Henderson to accompany his words.

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This is a handsome and unusual volume of self-published poetry by a chaplain who is part of a multidisciplinary team in a geriatric outpatient clinic in Iowa City, Iowa. The poems articulate the struggles of older individuals, their families, and their caregivers to make sense of changes in later life. The 30 "poem portraits" are told from varying points of view. Three of the more compelling works are "Constance," "Remembering the Trees," and "House Dreaming."

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This book's title is from a Goethe poem, "The Holy Longing," translated from German in its entirety by Robert Bly: "And so long as you haven't experienced / this: to die and so to grow, / you are only a troubled guest / on the dark earth." Ten intensely personal essays tell of the suffering and everyday presence of pain of a severely disabled writer who has advancing multiple sclerosis, and of how, "in a very real sense, and entirely without design, death has become [her] life's work." (p. 13)

Beginning with her father's sudden death when she was a child, the essays describe her aging mother's expected death and the family's decision to take her off life support; her caretaker husband's diagnosis of metastatic cancer with uncertain prognosis; her own attempted suicide; death of friends, pets, including her beloved dog; and a young pen-pal executed on death row. If that weren't enough, a coda, her foster son's murder and again the decision to remove life-support, provides "[t]he end. For now." (p. 191)

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A son beseeches his elderly father to fight, rather than accept, death: "Do not go gentle into that good night." He gives examples of how "wise men," "good men," "wild men," and "grave men" "rage against the dying of the light," and begs his father to do the same.

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This collection of 36 poems, some of which have been published individually in various literary magazines, is primarily about dead--or nearly dead--family members: a brother and sister lost to cancer; the speaker's palsied, nearly blind father dying of Parkinson's disease; his mother's struggle with chronic arthritis and heart disease.

The collection is divided into three untitled sections. The first deals primarily with the aging and death of the speaker's parents; the second with a wider range of abandonment and death, lost loves, dreams, innocence; the third almost exclusively with his sister's six year struggle with breast cancer and dying.

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