Summary

Leopold's Maneuvers is Cortney Davis's award-winning collection featuring 40 poems in two sections, in addition to the title poem. Thirty of the poems have been previously published in journals and anthologies such as Crazyhorse, Witness, Poetry, and Intensive Care. The content of the poems can roughly be divided into four categories: Nursing (e.g. "Leopold's Maneuvers," Examining the Abused Woman," "Water Story"); Domestic Remembrance (e.g. "Treatment," "The Brightest Star is Home," "When My Father's Breathing Stopped," "Everything in Life is Divided"); Flights of Imagination (e.g. "Shipwreck," "The Jar Beside the Bed"); and not unexpectedly, a Blend of the Realms in which she lives, works and dreams (e.g. "Mother's Gloves," "Confessions").

Commentary

What a difficult time I had in choosing the key words for this collection. In truth the list could have been even longer because Cortney Davis touches on so much in this stunning volume. Davis's has been one of the leading and among the strongest of the emerging voices of nurse-poets. As she states on her website--"A nurse's story is different from a doctor's story. Although we both inhabit the strange universe of illness, death, and healing, we bring to that world different skills and points of view. I write from the nurse's vantage point: we accompany patients as they go from illness to recovery; we walk with patients as they journey through death's door."

Miscellaneous

This collection won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and the American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year Award.

Publisher

Univ. of Nebraska Press

Place Published

Lincoln, Neb. and London

Edition

2004

Page Count

67