Summary:

Auden wrote this poem in memory of his own physician, Dr. David Protetch. He begins, "Most people believe / dying is something they do, / not their physician . . . " Auden, whose father was a physician, knows better. His father had warned him about doctors who are too aggressive or too concerned with money. Fortunately, he found a consultant who thought as his father did, perhaps because he (Dr. Protetch) had himself "been a victim / of medical engineers / and their arrogance, / when they atom-bombed / your sick pituitary / and over-killed it."

While prescribing for Auden’s minor complaints, Protetch himself was "mortally sick." Because of this, Auden felt that he could trust his doctor to tell him the truth about his medical condition: "if I were dying, / to say so, not insult me / with soothing fictions." Thus, Auden praises Protetch for having been, "what all / doctors should be, but few are . . . " [78 lines]

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Ruth is an orphaned seamstress. One day, while repairing ladies' dresses at a ball, she meets Henry Bellingham, an aristocratic young man who accompanies his proud partner to the seamstress' room. Circumstances throw Henry and Ruth together and the two become close friends; innocent Ruth has no idea of the trouble into which this affair is leading.

Henry invites her one Sunday to walk with him out of town to her old family home. She is blissfully happy during the trip, but on their return, they are overtaken by Ruth's employer who jumps to conclusions about the couple and fires Ruth on the spot. Pressed by circumstances, Ruth accepts Henry's offer of help. She travels with him to Scotland and the two become lovers. While in Scotland, Henry becomes ill. His mother is called and as soon as her son is well he returns to London with her, leaving the disgraced Ruth behind.

Ruth is ready to kill herself but is stopped by Thurston Benson, an invalid who pities Ruth and finds her a place to stay as she falls ill in her despair. When Thurston and his sister Faith find out that Ruth is pregnant, they have her move in with them, presenting her to their friends as a widow. Ruth bears a son and everything goes well for many years. Ruth's piety and goodness win the respect of her very traditional neighbors.

About this time, Henry Bellingham is campaigning to represent the district in which Ruth lives. He recognizes Ruth and tries to win her again, even offering marriage, but she will not listen to him. Soon after, a jealous woman in the town discovers Ruth's secret. Ruth is fired from her position as governess and despised by the townspeople. All her goodness stands for nothing in the face of her early mistake.

Ruth struggles on for her child's sake, even helping in the hospital during a typhus epidemic. She learns that Bellingham is nearby, deathly ill from typhus. She helps cure him, but leaves his bedside before he can recognize her. She, however, contracts the disease and dies. Bellingham comes to see her body.

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This book represents collaboration between neurologist-poet Jerome Freeman and potter Richard Bresnahan. Thirty-seven black-and-white photographs of ceramic pieces by Bresnahan from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts are interspersed with 56 of Freeman’s short poems. In his introduction Freeman writes, "Richard’s pottery (champions) both our environment and the need to nourish our humanity through cooperation and caring." Likewise, Freeman notes that much of his own poetry "attempts to focus upon caring." As he also points out, "the economy and simplicity of pottery can resemble the spare verbiage and subtlety of successful poetry."

Indeed, Freeman’s poems are simple, direct, and evocative. Many of them, such as "Carrying On" (p. 3), "Ten Year Old with Rheumatoid Arthritis" (p. 17), and "DTs" (p. 49), create images of patients. (However, the 88-year-old arthritis sufferer in "Carrying On" by no means considers himself a patient!) Others evoke more general human responses to severe illness ("Apocalypse," pp. 6-7), or to the threat of illness ("In Defense of the Hypochondriac," p. 15). In the former, Freeman writes of a comatose ICU patient, "All about keep mostly / thinking there’s a mistake / here somewhere." In the latter poem, Freeman concludes, "The worst might / happen. Keep crossing / bridges before you come / to them."

These poems also evoke the landscape and flora and fauna of the Great Plains: "Lake Superior in February" (p. 29), "The Prairie Gentian" (p. 79), and "When Wild Turkeys Come Out of the Woods" (p. 87). But the outside and inside worlds are closely connected. In "Coma Vigil" (p. 59), a poem about a woman in a persistent vegetative state, he begins, "Dawn’s bounty spills over / the rim of sky to spread / across darkened / prairie." Does the woman want to be kept alive in her "coma vigil"? The poem ends, "The time has / come. / Shadows still conceal / easy ways of letting / go."

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This is a collection of related stories, sketches, poems, and a one-act play by Jean Toomer, a little-known writer of the Harlem Renaissance. The book is divided into three sections. The first part of the book is a series of stories that portray the lives of poor black women in rural Georgia. They deal with such subjects as infanticide ("Karintha"), miscegenation ("Becky"), hysteria ("Carma"), lynching ("Blood-Burning Moon"), and religious mysticism ("Fern" and "Esther"). Taken together, these stories portray an intuitive, violent, spontaneous, and pre-rational culture.

The second part of Cane takes place in Washington, DC, where Toomer depicts the life of urban black Americans in the early 1920's. Here we encounter the conflict between rationalism, as represented by the well-educated "intellectuals," and traditional lifestyle and morality. The best stories in this section include, "Avey," "Theater," and "Box Seat."

The last section is a one-act play ("Kabnis") about two urban black writers attempting to establish a contemporary "Negro identity" in light of the repression and suffering of their people. One is overwhelmed by negativity and a sense of victimization, while the other man believes that the past can be transcended, especially through the power of art.

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In 1768 the young, feeble-minded King Christian VII of Denmark sets off on a prolonged tour of European capitals. His "handlers" determine that he needs to have a doctor along to help fend off, and to treat, the King’s frequent bouts of "agitation." Therefore, they appoint Johann Friedrich Struensee, a German physician from Altona, as the Royal Physician. Christian and Struensee develop a close bond; when the trip is over, the Royal Physician stays with the King and becomes a permanent fixture at the Danish court.

Christian is unstable and childlike. He enjoys playing games, but is totally uninterested in his beautiful young English wife, Caroline Mathilde. She becomes pregnant the first time he visits her, but he never sleeps with her again. Meanwhile, the King’s ministers actually run the government, even though he is theoretically an absolute monarch.

When Struensee, who is an Enlightenment intellectual, enters this ménage, he decides to reform the State by getting King Christian to agree to a series of enlightened new laws. Having won the King’s ear, the Royal Physician proceeds to rule Denmark for several years and to institute many of the reforms proposed by Voltaire and the other Enlightenment philosophers. Struensee also begins a tender, prolonged, and obvious love affair with the queen, who subsequently bears him a daughter.

The end of this story is not difficult to predict. Aggrieved members of the aristocracy manipulate the king to strip Dr. Struensee of his power and have him executed for adultery with Queen Caroline. She and the baby girl are shipped back to her home in England. The new Prime Minister retracts all of the reforms enacted by Struensee. And the demented king lives on in the fiction of his absolute power.

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This long poem in 20 sections seeks to explore, dissect, and create a language for the experience of hemophilia. "Blood pools in a joint / The limb locks . . . " The poet first dissects words like "trans / fusion" and "hema / toma," and showers the reader with images (like splatters of blood?).

In section 5 he states his purpose in the familiar jargon of educational objectives and later, in section 10, he utilizes spacing and line breaks to convert standard admonitions into poetry; for example, "These child- / ren should / not / be / punished, and / their / play with / other / children / should / be super- / vised . . . " Isolated phrases and sentences appear--some from the hospital and some from the "outside" world.

In some phrases the worlds of outside and inside mix, as in "Arterial sunrise, capillary dusk." Section 13 consists of laboratory reports. The poem breathes in and out, between syllables and long lines, between prosaic statements and poetic images. Finally, the poet finds words for the endless rhythm of hemophilia, "Gratitude and / fear--Your relentless / rhythm--I move to / it still . . . "

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This is psychiatrist Ron Charach's seventh collection of poems. It begins with the narrator going through security in order to board an airplane--a metaphor for contemporary society: we structure more and more "security" into our lives, but the uncertainty seems to increase, rather than decrease. The theme of the book is safe passage: our attempts to achieve it, our failures, and our companions along the way. In the last poem ("The Night After"), Charach tells us, "all the talk in the world cannot dampen my fear / of a world bereft of holiness." The quest is unsuccessful, yet somehow saved by a few fleeting moments of contact with something else; perhaps, it is the sacred.

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In this poem the speaker says she is talking about the real heart, not the sentimental image of a heart. Something is wrong with hers. She tries various images to describe it--a "caved hermit," an "unshelled turtle." She listens through an imaginary stethoscope. Most hearts say "I want, I want . . . " but hers is more uncertain. "Duplicitous," she calls it. Her heart says "I want, I don’t want . . . " In the flesh, this heart has an arrhythmia, the speaker can’t depend on it, it causes anxiety. In the spirit, though, this heart is equally undependable. How can she live with it? Sometime she will say "Heart, be still, / and it will."

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This chapbook by Kentucky poet Leatha Kendrick features a sequence of poems dealing with her experience of breast cancer and mastectomy. The "science" in the title moves from a little girl’s fascination with nature, and her insight that "all she learned was nothing / is only what you thought you saw" (p. 2); through her mature view of "these spiky shadows" on ultrasound (p. 10); to chemotherapy, where she feels "like the muck this stuff is supposed to make of the fast- / dividing cells" (p.18).

But the science of cancer fails to amputate the poet’s narrative. Early on, "My first love called them Skeeter and Bite. / Equal then, if small. Skeeter got / most of his attention." (p. 14) Later, during her treatment, "Excuse me while I grow bald and fat." (p. 21) Eventually she learns, "The map back is a flat / red road, underpinned with bone, / she must learn to dance upon." (p. 28).

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This is the second collection of poems by international health physician Norbert Hirschhorn. The first poem, "Number Our Days," is a meditation based on a verse from Psalm 90, "Let us number our days / That we may get us a heart of wisdom." The poet reflects on his mother's escaping the Holocaust ("my blond head sucking her breast"), her subsequent depressions, and eventually the day when the adult son was faced with the decision whether to dialyze his dying mother.

This poem sets the stage for the whole collection: an inquiry into the meaning of family and love and memory. Hirschhorn doesn't take himself too seriously, as in his description of adolescent lust ("Donna, Oh Donna"), the compelling "Self Portrait, "Growing up in New York / with skull caps and spittle, I felt demeaned to be Jewish / and fled to the Ivy league," and the wonderful "New Old Uncle Blues."

There are three major clusters of poems: one that deals with the poet's family and childhood; a second cycle of love, distance, divorce, and renewed love; and, finally, an engaging set of poems that focus on his experience in Indonesia and Southeast Asia. In "On a Guesthouse Veranda in Surakarta, Central Java," Hirschhorn writes, "What matters here? Nothing. / Never has life been / so sweet." And "A Non Believer Wakens to the First Call to Prayer" ends with these beautiful lines, "The men who pray raise up their palms. / Soon the sun will warm the stones."

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