Showing 1 - 10 of 74 annotations contributed by Donley, Carol

I Hear Their Voices Singing: Poems New and Collected

Davis, Cortney

Last Updated: Jul-24-2020
Annotated by:
Donley, Carol

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Collection (Poems)

Summary:

 Cortney Davis has divided this collection of her poetry into seven major sections which she calls “Voices.” The first and last sections are “Voices of Healing” which frame and wrap around the others: “Home,” “Desire,” “Suffering,” “Faith,” and “Letting Go and Holding On.” The sections include previously published poems as well as new ones.  Davis is known for her ability to see and understand what is going on and to express that in ways that help the reader “get it.”  This collection also shows her ability to hear the unique voices that express suffering, faith, desire—and to convey empathic understanding of the speaker.  Sometimes she gets angry with the speaker. The poems range through time, from her childhood, nursing training, nursing experiences, deaths of her parents, to more current experiences with grandchildren.  Throughout there is a consistent caring and compassion, mixed with many other feelings, many of them contradictory.

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Learning to Heal: Reflections on Nursing School in Poetry and Prose

Bryner, Jeanne; Davis, Cortney

Last Updated: Jul-21-2018
Annotated by:
Donley, Carol

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Anthology (Mixed Genres)

Summary:

In this remarkable anthology, 51 women and men describe their nursing school experiences, from initial fears and anxieties to increasing confidence and appreciation of the profession.  Jeanne Bryner, in her Introduction, explains how she and Cortney Davis deliberately sought a diverse group of nurse-writers, from recent nursing graduates in their twenties to seasoned veterans in their nineties.  Their collection includes different races, nationalities, social and economic classes, and education levels.  What the contributors have in common besides being nurses is that they are gifted writers able to capture in poetry or prose the transforming moments of their lives. Nursing students reading this anthology will recognize many kindred souls, struggling with the same uncertainties and apprehensions, wondering how they will ever accomplish all this, but also gaining command of the profession, relishing its special rewards, valuing patients as their ultimate teachers. All readers will understand what is so special about nursing .




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The Worm: Elderside Clinic, Jamaica

Coulehan, Jack

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Donley, Carol

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

Children wasting away, in pain, infected with parasites whose life cycle continues "bodies to fingers, / fingers to lips, of lips to eggs / and eggs to worms." That cycle is echoed in the human experiences of "loneliness to pangs of loss" and of "deep escape to deep connection." The actual parasites take on symbolic significance and become the worm that inhabits us all, whether we be sick kids or weary health care providers.

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Tumbleweed

Coulehan, Jack

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Donley, Carol

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

Father reappears 28 years after deserting the family and living like a "tumbleweed"--playing bit parts in movies and drifting around alone. The son finds him strapped into a chair, drooling into a cup, dying of a lung disease. His father tells him, "A loner’s like a tumbleweed; / he breaks off, blows away, dries up."

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The Six Hundred Pound Man

Coulehan, Jack

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Donley, Carol

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

The extraordinary image of a six hundred pound man, spread across two beds, dying, whom the doctor might at first find to be grotesque, is transformed in the doctor's dream. In that dream he sees the man as the center of a ceremony in which healers "wrestle the souls of old bodies back to bones . . . back back to their beginnings." The doctor comes to realize that this "worthless and alien" body is beautiful.

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Shall Inherit

Coulehan, Jack

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Donley, Carol

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

Pale, gaunt children from the backwoods hills of Kentucky bring their stool specimens to school so the visiting physician can check for worms. But these sinewy kids come from a long line of leathery ancestors "bred from one tough root"--and they keep on surviving whether they have worms or not. They "shall inherit" the earth, whether or not physicians treat them.

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My Uganda--for Sister Concepta Najjemba

Coulehan, Jack

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Donley, Carol

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

An African nun, in Pittsburgh, identifies with her home country of Uganda, envisioning the brutality of the civil war, torturing her father and murdering her brother. Her body is like her country--"frightened / delirious / insensate / and holy." Sleepless, she sits on the edge of her bed and prays--"her prayer is sweet, sweet medicine" both for her own distress and, somehow, for her country’s.

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Jerusalem

Coulehan, Jack

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Donley, Carol

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

The son narrator of this poem has asked his Jamaican physician-father a number of questions. His father is a great healer, saving thousands of his countrymen through medicine, surgery, and preaching. Although the "Queen receives him in London and gives him the Empire", his father knows how useless that is, and "puts the British Empire into a drawer of memories." All that London pomp and ceremony is a different world from Kingston, "Smoldering under the weight of tin and grease." The father's vision is of "Jerusalem, a black city full of his sons."

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The Dynamizer and the Oscilloclast: in memory of Albert Abrams, an American quack

Coulehan, Jack

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Donley, Carol

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

This poem is told in the voice of the quack who creates electronic gadgets that are supposed to cure illnesses. He advertises on the back covers of magazines. Poor, desperate people, whose doctors cannot help them, sell their farms in order to come to the quack for his dynamizer and oscilloclast treatments. He asks, "What could I do but give them hope?"

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The Dust of the West

Coulehan, Jack

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Donley, Carol

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

A blind father, covered with dust, rides through dust clouds carrying camera equipment belonging to a famous photographer of the West. The father believes that each piece of dust has a soul and that if he can sensuously perceive that dust he can release its soul--"Blessings of dirt, gathering and rising"--a kind of resurrection out of the dust.

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