Summary:

Practice is Richard Berlin’s third book of poetry (two of which are chapbooks) in addition to two prose books. It contains 64 poems and is fronted by an essay, “Why Doctors Need Poetry”. A few pages of notes at the end helpfully explain the context for 15 of the poems. As Dr. Berlin explains at the beginning of his opening essay: “Most of the poems in this volume first appeared in my column, ‘Poetry of the Times,’ a feature of Psychiatric Times”, which, at the time of publication of this volume he had been writing for 16 years. This—and many more poems in other journals, anthologies, and books— all from a man who began writing poetry in “mid-life”. Evident in the poems in this collection is a person experiencing much more than medical/psychiatric practice, but a full cornucopia of life: his love of art, music, food, nature, and the people he shares this bounty with. The collection, presented in three sections, weaves through all of these rich encounters, with only the final section, the shortest of the three, having more of a focus on family, friends and late of the year poems.

View full annotation

Summary:

Richard M. Ratzan brings together scholars and creative writers to celebrate the legacy of the sixteenth-century Flemish physician and anatomist, Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564), and his 1543 landmark text, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body). Ratzan defines the volume as an “ekphrastic collection of poetry, art and short prose” inspired by “the inimitably conceived and executed anatomical woodcuts” of Vesalius’s most enduring creation (xi). Organized by different genres, Ratzan presents introductory essays, ekphrastic works, translations of Vesalius-inspired poems, and detailed note and bibliography sections. The collection does not merely panegyrize but articulates the deeper intellectual import of De Humani’s meticulous anatomical renderings. Sachiko Kusukawa’s introductory essay frames De Humani as a “rhetorically charged polemic and defense” that challenged the European medical institution in two key ways (3). First, it promoted the revival of the “ancient [Greek and Roman] practice of healing based on diet, medicines and surgery,” a bold effort that aimed to resuscitate anatomy and other forms of “hands-on engagement” that had fallen out of favor with Vesalius’s contemporaries (2). Second, De Humani emendated the anatomical descriptions advanced by Galen, a second-century physician who promoted dissection in his Anatomical Procedures and whom European physicians considered an authority (3). This volume captures the fascinating fusion of artistry and intellectual individuality that characterizes Vesalius’s work.

View full annotation

Summary:

This collection of poems is a memoir in verse: it is a lyric and epistolary exploration of what it is to live in the limbo of an emotional and psychological ambiguity whose genesis lies in maternal loss, mourning, depression, and despair.  The poems are arranged in three sections:  “Crossing,” “Asylum Song,” and “Holding.” 

The “Crossing section generally conveys to readers the nature of life in this limbo, even as it discloses some of the familial anguish that has brought about a repressive silence in the poet’s mother, as well as a depression that wreaked its havoc on the poet’s growing up.  The family mysteries and the suffering of the poet prompt her to research the death of her maternal grandmother, and we learn many details of that loss in the poems of the “Asylum Song” section. 

A Czech immigrant, the woman had, in the old country, lost her parents and sister, and she’d apparently abandoned—for reasons unknown—her illegitimate child.  She’d married an older man and moved to the States.  After giving birth to another child, she suffered a postpartum depression, for which she was placed in an asylum, and was heavily and inappropriately medicated.  She died within three weeks, at age 34.  Her daughter, the poet’s mother, grew up in her absence and, in turn, lost her own child—the poet’s sister—in infancy, prior to Baptism. 

According to widely held beliefs of Catholics at the time, the infant would thus be relegated to Limbo for eternity: she would be barred from union with God, this is to say, though kept free from any punishment or any suffering, other than the longing for a bliss she could never attain.  Such a belief would clearly exacerbate the feelings of failure and guilt that a mother might feel in losing her infant.  The poet’s mother’s depression resulted, unsurprisingly, in a bewildering absence of maternal care in the poet’s life: she is stuck in her own “asylum” or Limbo—a state of emotional confinement where she maintains some vision of “beatific” maternal love, but feels it forever beyond her reach to experience.  The poems of the final section, “Holding,” convey the struggle and surprising joy of inhabiting this Limbo.

View full annotation

Summary:

The speaker of this dramatic monologue in prose is an archangel.  He attempts to tell his listeners—mortals, presumably—of the beauty to be treasured in the extraordinary ordinary of the everyday world.  The Archangel speaks in nothing less than glorious diction, baroque syntax, and enchanting rhythm: he labors, rhetorically, to communicate in a language congruent with the complex, extravagant beauty of the world he describes.  He pleads with his audience to listen to him and share in the profound aesthetic experience so readily available—but he pleads to no avail: his audience will not listen.  In response to his audience's attempted departure, the Archangel implores, “Wait.  Listen.  I will begin again.”

View full annotation

Summary:

The narrator of this story is a lifeguard who contemplates his identity and life-roles as he lounges in his lifeguard chair, elevated above the crowd of beachgoers.  In the winter months, he is a student of divinity; in the summer months, he ascends the throne marked with a red cross in the hopes of guarding the lives of those at play before him.  While he remains vigilant for calls of help, those calls never come, and the lifeguard confronts the troubling insight of the limited contributions he’s devoting his life to make.

View full annotation

Summary:

This thought-provoking poem is best read with a representation of the painting to which it refers in view (the painting, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel, is reproduced in On Doctoring). Auden considers the nature of human suffering: "how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking / dully along . . . . " For each individual life affected by personal catastrophe (in the painting, Icarus falling from the sky into the ocean), there is the rest of humankind which must go about its daily business, either oblivious or unable to assist (in the painting, Icarus might almost be overlooked, flailing in the lower corner of the picture while the ploughman in the foreground has his back turned). Life, and death go on although the sufferer, and sometimes those who are paying attention, find this inconceivable. And what about the ship "that must have seen / Something amazing" but "had somewhere to get to"? What is the context in which suffering is noticed, what obligations exist, what can and cannot be remedied?

View full annotation

Summary:

The poem was inspired by a painting of the same title by Edward Hopper (Early Sunday Morning). Stone describes what is visible in the painting and then muses about what "may be" happening. For example, in "the next block someone may be practicing the flute."

Hopper's painting, like all art and literature, is an invitation for engagement, reflection, and expansion. While Stone inventories the painting's urban terrain, he is compelled to enter into the picture with his imagination. By doing so he demonstrates our dual capacity for both the facts of science and the less precise, but equally valuable impulses of fiction.

View full annotation

Summary:

One of two sons of a broken U.S.-Dutch family, Kiddo chooses to live off the Dutch welfare system spending his state alms on drugs. Although he realizes it is but the bleakest of efforts not to come to grips with a difficult relationship with his older brother, Morton, Kiddo perseveres, forming an uneasy alliance with Pietje, a woman who also knows Morton.

The novel is told by Kiddo with contributions to the multi-faceted story in the form of letters from Morton, who gives up a brilliant future as a genius in physics to travel around the world, and diary entries by Pietje, who has some unpleasant truths to tell about Kiddo's world. Morton, known as Mort, writes Kiddo that he has cancer and not long to live, returning home to die. Honoring the dying request of his brother, Kiddo attends Mort's autopsy (yes, the play on Morte/Mort proves irresistible to Morley, or is it Mor(te)ley), a fairly gruesome scene. This proves not to be the death of Mort/Morte/Death for Kiddo and he requires help from Pietje and more introspection before Kiddo can lay his brother's bones to rest.

View full annotation

Summary:

The Matisse art work which forms the center for this story is the painting, "Le Silence Habité des Maisons," which shows a parent and child with featureless faces sitting at a table while looking together at a book. This painting is described as the reader is introduced to a family of artists and their unusual housekeeper, Mrs. Brown.

The mother is the design editor of a magazine, A Woman’s Place, and the father is a rigid, relatively unsuccessful painter. There are two children in the family. Mrs. Brown provides the cement to keep the family together and learns from them ways to develop her own unusual kind of art. Interpersonal relationships are fragile and personal needs are great. There is a surprise ending.

View full annotation

Summary:

This is the story of the experiences of a middle aged university teacher when visiting her regular beauty salon. A copy of Matisse’s painting, "Rosy Nude" is part of the decor of the salon and is actually what attracts her to the salon in the first place. The main character’s self image and her desire to maintain a natural appearing hairstyle are central to the story.

Her relationship with the owner, who is her personal hair dresser, is also central and the body images of him and others who work in the shop or are customers add interest and color to the story. The conclusion is theatrical and unexpected and points out the many differences in the way we view ourselves and the way in which we are viewed by others.

View full annotation