Showing 1 - 10 of 74 annotations in the genre "Poetry"

After Reading Music from Apartment 8

Berlin, Richard

Last Updated: Sep-27-2021
Annotated by:
Ratzan, Richard M.

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

This is a poem by one physician-poet, Richard M Berlin, a well published psychiatrist in Massachusetts, that celebrates the life and work of another physician-poet, John Stone, and recounts the effects of the latter’s poetry on Dr. Berlin over thirty years. The poem was published twice, once in JAMA in 2006 and again in Psychiatric Times in August 2008, shortly before John Stone died in his sleep of cancer in November.

The poem is 24 lines in free verse with no stanza breaks. As the title indicates, it is an occasional poem. The occasion? Poet A reading the admired work of Poet B, like Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”. In his poem Berlin commemorates the occasion of his having just read Stone’s 2004 volume of poetry, Music from Apartment 8. The title of Stone’s volume derives from Stone’s mother’s address in Decatur, Georgia. Consisting of five sentences, the poem begins with an account of his reading Stone’s poetry as “a hiker” who stops to “admire the view of snow-capped peaks.” The second sentence records the Berlin’s reflections “three decades later” of Stone and the premature death of Berlin's father. Following this thought, the poet compares Stone’s poetry to the compass his father would have been had he lived longer, Stone’s compass directing him to the possibility of his writing poetry as well, a poetry originating with our patients’ heartbeats. The penultimate sentence is a prayer that Stone is “drinking deep from whatever stream brings you to your knees.” Berlin ends with the further hope that Stone will be able to hear Berlin’s “boots striding behind” Stone’s, “both soles still strong.” There is no published record that I could find that Stone read Berlin’s poem.

In a subsequent essay, Berlin discusses this poem and the history of his relationship to Stone and the latter’s poetry. (1)

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Three Poems by Felice Aull

Aull, Felice

Last Updated: Jul-12-2021
Annotated by:
Davis, Cortney

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

Poet Felice Aull has three poems in "Lullabies & Confessions," an anthology of poems about parenting published by University Professors Press. In her poems, Aull often bravely sheds her professional mantle to reveal personal experiences, deeply observed.

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Hair

Corso, Gregory

Last Updated: Apr-25-2021
Annotated by:
Mahl, Evan

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

The poem, through an account of the narrator’s experiences with losing hair, explores issues such as aging, sexuality, and our impotence when faced with the vagaries of nature as it transforms our bodies. Ranging from ancient Egyptian lore to dime store pharmacies, Corso weaves a kaleidoscope of images about how humans treat and worry about their hair and how hair has been a mythopoetic vehicle for millennia.Much of the poem employs angry though humorous language whereby the narrator speaks to his hair and pleads with the gods to reverse his fate. Corso writes, "To lie in bed and be hairless is a blunder only God could allow--"; and later, "Damned be hair! . . . Hair that costs a dollar fifty to be murdered!" The poem ends with an angry diatribe against hair and an inspired denigration of its mythological power.

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Mercy

Montgomery, Judith

Last Updated: Mar-27-2020
Annotated by:
Davis, Cortney

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

"Mercy," winner of the Wolf Ridge Press Narrative / Poetic Medicine Prize, contains nineteen powerful poems--poems that provide an intimate look into the author's role as caregiver to her husband who is living with, and being treated for, liposarcoma.  But the poems in this small volume are not just about husband and wife.  Cancer becomes a third character, one who is often addressed as a presence lingering in the same house, sleeping in the same bed, never absent from every moment of struggle or from any moments of joy.  In the opening poem, "Cozy" (page 1), the couple has "escaped" to a remote rented cabin.  They slip "from love-rumpled featherbed and sheets" feeling "safe" within the sturdy cabin walls that "keep out driving rain or freeze."  For those hours, nothing can spoil their happiness, "even Cancer, who squats on our stoop, / flipping his gold coin in lazy arcs."  At the close of "Cozy," as the couple drives home from their respite, Cancer rides with them, sitting between them "as he hums and nods / pleasantly--first to you, then to me, // one hand lightly resting on each near thigh."  The author weaves this threatening image of Cancer as an ever-present entity throughout the poems that follow.

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From Nothing

Krugovoy Silver, Anya

Last Updated: Jan-06-2020
Annotated by:
Davis, Cortney

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

There are 48 poems in this volume (the author's third full-length collection), divided into three sections.  The author's first book, “The Ninety-Third Name of God” introduced us to her family and especially to her diagnosis--inflammatory breast cancer--the disease discovered in 2004 during her pregnancy, the disease that claimed her life in August, 2018 when she was forty-nine-years old.

In her second collection, “I Watched You Disappear”  Silver's poems invited us to accompany her on her journey through treatment, anger, despair, determination, and faith. This third collection (her penultimate) continues the author's beautifully written illness narrative, again presenting moments of joy and of despair, and always of hope.

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I Watched You Disappear

Krugovoy Silver, Anya

Last Updated: Nov-21-2019
Annotated by:
Davis, Cortney

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

There are 46 poems in this volume (the author's second full-length collection), divided into four sections.  The author's first book, "The Ninety-Third Name of God" , introduced us to her family and especially to her diagnosis--inflammatory breast cancer--the disease discovered in 2004 during her pregnancy, the disease that claimed that claimed her life in August, 2018, when she was forty-nine-years old.  This second collection continues Silver's illness narrative, poems that might serve as a journal of her journey through treatment, anger, despair, determination, and faith.

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The Ninety-Third Name of God

Krugovoy Silver, Anya

Last Updated: Jul-25-2019
Annotated by:
Davis, Cortney

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

There are 46 poems in this volume (the author's first full-length collection), divided into three parts--the poems in the second section are in memory of women who have died of inflammatory breast cancer, the same disease that claimed the life of the author in August, 2018, when she was forty-nine-years old.  Diagnosed in 2004 during her pregnancy, Anya waited until after her son Noah was born to begin cancer treatment.  These poems, published in 2010, begin in images of her domestic life and her family, move forward to her cancer diagnosis (p. 17: "Biopsy"), and progress to examine, in poems that balance beauty and pain, what it is like to live with the knowledge of early death.  This awareness imparts a crystalline honesty and urgency to every poem. 

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I AM

Clare, John

Last Updated: Jun-24-2019
Annotated by:
Ratzan, Richard M.

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

"I AM" is a poem by John Clare with three sestets in iambic pentameter with an ABABAB rhyming pattern unique to each sestet. In it the poet affirms his identity, his sorrows to date and ends with the expressed longing for a happier life in the presence of God and the solitude of Nature. Due to his disorderly life, unconcern for conventional spelling, and transcriptions of his poems by others, there are often multiple versions extant for an individual poem. This is true for "I AM", which Jonathan Bate, the author of a magisterial biography of the poet, states was written in a psychiatric institution about 1846. (1, page 505) For this annotation I have used what many consider to be the most authoritative edition of his poems. The poem also exists in several reliable sites on the internet.

The poet was a troubled man born near Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, England, in 1793, in meager circumstances and remaining so throughout his entire life. Save for a five month period in 1841, Clare spent the last 27 of his 71 years in psychiatric institutions. He wrote his poetry, which primarily celebrates the natural world he spent so much time in alone, before and during his hospitalizations. His reputation as a poet has burgeoned significantly in the last 100 years.


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Taking Care of Time

Davis, Cortney

Last Updated: Jan-02-2019
Annotated by:
Kohn, Martin

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

In this volume by the esteemed nurse-poet/writer, Cortney Davis, are 43 previously published poems (some revised for this collection), assembled in 3 sections-- the middle section featuring her long poem, "Becoming the Patient," that recounts through 10 shorter poems her time "in the hospital."

The poems in the surrounding sections describe in beautiful and intimate detail her patients' lives and the call to and practice of nursing. Featured throughout are battles won and lost-- with disease, with the medical staff, and as the title-- taking care of time-- suggests, the finitude we all face. No matter the difficulties of hospital life-- whether as practitioner or patient-- its familiarity  provides grounding and comfort in these poems as, for example, heard through the speaker of "First Night at the Cheap Hotel" who tells us:

"Being here is like being sick in a hospital ward
without the lovely, muffling glove of illness.
In hospital, I would be drowsy, drugged into a calm
that accepts the metal door's clang,
the heavy footfall right outside my door.
All these, proof of life,
and there would be a nurse too, holding my wrist,
counting and nodding, only a silhouette in the dark" (p.67)

And if sometimes the experiences and images become too hard to bear, the skillful nurse-poet can, as Cortney Davis does in "On-Call: Splenectomy," "tame them on page” (p.52).

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Comfort Measures Only

Campo, Rafael

Last Updated: Nov-26-2018
Annotated by:
Davis, Cortney

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

Physician Rafael Campo's collection of new and selected poems is a lovely look back (selected poems are from 1994 to 2016) and an exciting look at thirty-one new poems that continue his trademark use of a variety of poetic forms (the title poem "Comfort Measures Only" is a Villanelle, pg 135) and the moving and personal examination of his interactions with patients.   This collection begins with Campo's excellent introductory essay, "Illness as Muse" (pgs 1-9).  

As the essay opens, an audience member tells Campo that his poems are "really depressing." Even Campo's spouse advises him to lighten things up, a counsel I hope the poet never heeds--for it is precisely Campo's unwavering examination of sorrow, regret, death, and despair that set his poems apart from poems that find "butterflies or snowflakes or flowers as more suitable." Campo responds: "Try as I might to take all of this concern to heart . . . I keep finding myself drawn to write about illness" (pg 1).

Campo recalls how singing and praying consoled his grandmother and seemed to lessen her physical ills: "No wonder I have come to believe in the power of the imagination if not to cure, then to heal" (pg 4).  On page five he notes "To write about illness, to heed this terrible muse, is to reject distancing and to embrace empathy, for which there is no reward or claim on greatness other than perhaps the perverse joy of recognizing oneself as being susceptible to the same foibles and neuroses as anyone."  Indeed it is this vulnerability--the ability to see physician and patient on the same plane, as equal players in a moment in time--that has become another hallmark of Campo's poetry. Selected poems from previously published collections follow the essay: nine poems from "The Other Man Was Me" (1994); eight poems from "What the Body Told" (1997); nine poems from "Diva" (200); five poems from "Landscape with Human Figure" (2002); seven poems from "The Enemy" (2007); and twenty poems from "Alternative Medicine" (2013).  Of these collections, all but "Landscape with Human Figure" and "The Enemy" have been reviewed in the database.

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