Summary:

These fourteen sonnets interweave themselves to form a unified work, just as lines are repeated or echoed to interweave in the individual poems, providing an account of the author’s experience of breast cancer, radical mastectomy, and recovery. The medical details appear more prominently in the early sonnets, but gradually, other themes take precedence: suffering and how to compare relative degrees of suffering among individuals and groups; the reaction of oneself and one’s lovers to a disfigured body; and the search for affirmation, for a reason to want to live and be rid of the horror of disease and death.

Note: A relevant Web site about and by artist-model Matuschka, http://www.songster.net/projects/matuschka/, has been annotated in the art section of this database (Matuschka: Matuschka Archive).

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Two metaphors permeate this poem about drinking a barium containing liquid prior to fluoroscopy to determine cancer growth and staging. The first metaphor involves the liquid as alcohol and the radiology suite as a rather perverse bar. Hence the patient drinks the proffered liquid which "froths and hisses like volcanic vodka / or martinis by Dr. Hyde." The second metaphor is 'cancer is war.' The body is seen as a battleground in which the "army of metastasizing cells / advances, armed and dangerous." The patient realizes that medical interventions are allies in this fight, but drinks the barium "as Socrates / must have: one eye on the door."

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This is the first "selected poems" by Claes Andersson to appear in English. Drawn from his 18 collections published in Finland, they are generally short (less than one page) poems without titles. As the Introduction notes, Andersson's early poetry features blunt language, while his later work strives for more musicality. Drawing on his psychiatric experience, Anderson uses "private life as a foundation for an investigation of all that shapes our identity."

Friendship is a frequent theme in these poems, as in "Philemon and Baukis": "If you become a fir / I'll be a birch/ Thus you protect and warm me / through the cold seasons / In return I'll dance for you / in the summer nights . . . " (p. 75) One of the most striking poems in the collection is "the new theology," which begins: "Disease is the conscience of the body / What would we be without our ailments . . . " (p. 112)

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The first full-length collection of poetry by a Canadian medical social worker who cares for cancer patients and their families. The "longing" of the title expresses the human yearning for love, knowledge, completeness, and healing.

Many of these poems deal with the process of revealing the inner workings of the world (and the inner truth of persons) through photography; see "Darkroom: 1," in which, "I watched you emerge / take on form / and intensity." X-ray photography, of course, takes this one step further, allowing us to see the insides of bodies.

The long last section of the book includes 24 poems that deal explicitly with illness and health care. Among the best of these are "Worker Classification: Material Handler," "Hand to Mouth," "Wishbone," and a sequence of short poems called "Post-Mortem Report."

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The doctor-speaker wonders about a recently diagnosed male leukemia patient: what will Mr. Claridge, who used to think of himself as a ladies' man, dream of now, after the diagnosis? In the final image the doctor-speaker imagines the sleep of his secretary, to whom Mr. Claridge had given a bottle of Nuit d'Amour perfume," her arms crossed like a nun's" and surrounded by the flowery scent of the perfume.

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This poem of ten short lines focuses on the immediacy and surprise of an arm breaking "like a tree branch / the green bones sprung like the tines of a fork."

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The narrator is visiting a sick loved one in University Hospital, Boston and reflects on the many patients who have stayed in this hospital, most especially the young men from the battlefields of the American Civil War.

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This is a two-verse, ten-line poem about the narrator's father, who is obviously being kept alive against his own will (he "stormed against equivocation, / Heaving against tubes and wires"). He wants no part of these life-sustaining gadgets; in fact, "they" have to "bind him down." Finally, the doctors ask him why he's acting this way and, unable to speak, the old man asks for a pencil and paper and angrily scribbles in his "clearest, / Most commanding hand, 'I am dead.'"

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Zimmer's poem begins with policy guidelines for landlords whose elderly tenants may be calling the switchboard more than three times per month for health emergencies. According to the guidelines, such patterns suggest that the resident, no longer capable of independent living, can be moved to a health care center.

In response to the policy passage, an advisory poem is constructed by the narrator for his own father who, we can assume, values his independence. In essence the son advises silence about medical events such as a fall: "tell no one." If an ambulance should arrive, don't get in.

The strong warnings reflect contemporary health care systems in which the prevailing practices correspond to Dante's Inferno, particularly the tenth circle. At that level, everyone faces one direction and people are "piled like cordwood inside the cranium of Satan." Cries for help are unheard and unanswered.

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Mary Oliver's six stanzas are a meditation on the processes of life and death. The narrator observes the death of a snake by a truck that "could not swerve." The occurrence of sudden death is, after all, "how it happens" and the snake now lies "looped and useless as an old bicycle tire." For most observers of this familiar sight, that would be the end. The narrator, however, stops his car and carries the cool and gleaming snake to the bushes where it is as "beautiful and quiet as a dead brother."

Upon continuing his drive, the experience generates reflection about death: its suddenness, its weight, and its certainty. At the same time the narrator notes that dying and death of others ignites a brighter fire, one of good fortune: "not me!"

The final stanza describes the innate drive and tenacity of life forces. Because life, rather than death, is at the center of each cell, unimpeded by death, the snake and all other forms of life move forward tenaciously, unimpeded by the threat of death.

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