LitMed: Literature Arts Medicine Database

"My Borrowed Face," Stacy Nigliazzo's third full-length poetry collection, contains 55 poems, presented as a continuous flow without division into sections. Once again, Nigliazzo's poems are spare, often only phrases or words scattered on the white page, a form that leads the reader's eye from one image to the next. (For a brief discussion of how this poet uses white space, see the annotation of her second collection, “Sky the Oar” on this database.) The poems in this collection were written during the Covid pandemic; they speak of the toll the virus has taken and continues to take not only on patients but, in these poems, on the caregivers--specifically the poet. Nigliazzo, an emergency room nurse who has worked through five pandemic surges, is the perfect narrator to take us along on her rounds.

The book's early poems look back before the pandemic ("5920 Days Pre-Pandemic," p. 11) and then they come closer ("30 Days Pre-Pandemic," p. 12), until they begin to chart, with stark imagery, the beginning and the continuation of the pandemic. We walk with the poet / nurse as she ticks off the days from "First Sunday on the Ward, Pandemic," p. 15, through "575 Days Out," p. 41.

The 16 poems that close the book are a rest, in a sense, from the pandemic. These poems are individual reflections, like quick photographs, that capture a variety of observations both personal and professional. "Self-Portrait as the Pink Moon," p. 42, and "Blue Book," p. 43, hark back first to Nigliazzo's mother, pregnant with the poet, then to her mother's death. In a way, circling this collection back to the beginning, birth and death, the never ending turning.

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Ward Rounds

Beernink, K. D. (Kenneth Dale)

Last Updated: Apr-25-2022

Coulehan, Jack

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Collection (Poems)

Summary:

This is a collection of poems about patients, written by a young physician in the late 1960s. The book is organized around the theme of a hospital ward. Each poem is named for a patient and has the patient’s disease as its subtitle. The poet composed these poems during his own illness when, as he says in the original Introduction, “my patients reappeared to me, and I lived again in my mind all the many emotions we experienced together.” K. Dale Beernick died of chronic myelocytic leukemia at the age of 31 in 1969. In Ward Rounds he recounts his experiences as a medical student and house officer. He uses a variety of forms and techniques, including rhyme, blank verse, haiku, and even one villanelle. The poems vary in quality and impact. Among the best are "Penny Brown" (rheumatic heart disease), "Theodosus Bull" (delirium tremens), "Anonymous" (spontaneous abortion), and "Minnie Freeme" (post-necrotic cirrhosis).

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Daughter

Davis, Cortney

Last Updated: Jan-17-2022

Shafer, Audrey

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Collection (Poems)

Summary:

Davis, a nurse practitioner, chronicles her daughter’s life, illness and death at age 54 from cancer. The book consists of three sections, with poems unevenly divided such that of the 30 poems, only one rests in section II. Titled Windmill, this poem forms a fulcrum between the relationship of mother and daughter to one of mother and ill daughter. The windmill is a small gift from her daughter – a reminder of Kansas where the daughter, her husband and children live, thousands of miles from Davis. The collection begins with her ‘soon-to-be born daughter’ (page 15) and ends with The Sacrament of Time, dated months before her daughter’s death from, at this point, a widely metastatic breast cancer. The final poem holds within it an entire world – the birth of the daughter, the fraught frantic mother-to-be pleading for help, the birth of a healthy baby girl, the wonder of the new addition to their family, the travel with the newborn to home, and a reflection on what poems can and cannot do. “Poems cannot // save us, Amichai said, but all I have are these poems” (page 58).

If the first section details the many ways unconditional love for a child unfolds, through wonders of babyhood, delights of childhood, the harsh lessons of adolescence, and the successful launch, the final section underscores how deep that love runs. As the cancer illness progressed during the pandemic, issues of separation became more acute. Davis marks the numbers affected (illness and death) by coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19) during the pandemic, as her poems follow her daughter’s cancer. These numbers, along with brief quotations from her daughter’s scans and reports, lend a contrast to the evocative imagery and experience of illness in a loved one. Medical mistakes are chronicled as well (see What a Terrible Mistake).

The collection is dedicated to Davis’ daughter and her daughter’s children. Even the title, Daughter, calls to her, as if addressing her daughter directly. The title also serves to universalize the parenting of a daughter, even as the particulars of this family are detailed.

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Pandemic Haiku

Bordowitz, Gregg

Last Updated: Dec-06-2021

Zander, Devon

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Collection (Poems)

Practice

Berlin, Richard

Last Updated: Oct-26-2021

Kohn, Martin

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Collection (Poems)

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.

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After Reading Music from Apartment 8

Berlin, Richard

Last Updated: Sep-27-2021

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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Freud on My Couch

Berlin, Richard

Last Updated: Aug-11-2021

Davis, Cortney

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Collection (Poems)

Secret Wounds

Berlin, Richard

Last Updated: Aug-06-2021

Coulehan, Jack

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Collection (Poems)

Summary:

In Secret Wounds, his second full length collection of poetry, psychiatrist Richard Berlin continues his exploration of the inner world of medicine with a sequence of 73 poems that flow seamlessly, uninterrupted by grouping into topics or sections. In the first poem, “Lay Down Sally,” the author attends a man dying on dialysis, and concludes with “A nurse hangs the morphine. / I write my blue notes.” In the last, “The Last Concert of Summer,” he reflects on his long experience with the sick and suffering, ending the poem with, “I place a stethoscope in my ears and listen / to the heart when I’ve run out of things to say.” In between, the poems reflect varied incidents, topics, conflicts, and wounds, as they occur from medical education (“Teaching Rounds,” “Touch,” “On Call, 3 AM”) through a life in medical practice (“Rage,” “The Scientists,” “How a Psychiatrist Parties”) to something like enlightenment (“Note to Pablo Neruda,” “A Psychiatrist’s Guitar,” “End of Summer”).

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