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Published in 1844, "Grief" is one of several sonnets Elizabeth Barrett Browning (EBB), the oldest of twelve children, wrote following the death of her 33 year old beloved brother and immediately younger sibling, Edward (nicknamed "Bro"), by drowning in 1840. (Another brother, Samuel, had also died, 5 months earlier at age 28, in Cinnamon Hill, the family's estate in Jamaica, from a fever.) The other sonnets reflecting the numbing grief EBB felt (as expressed in her letters) after Bro's death are "Tears" and "Substitution". All were published in her 1844 Poems.

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"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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This poem describes how, during the anatomy lesson, the medical student feels curiosity about the wonders of the human body. He is torn between his desire for knowledge and the horror he feels in cutting up a dead body: "the violence of abomination." This marks a transitional point in the student’s medical career path.

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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?

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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.

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Claude Monet (1840--1926) was a French impressionist painter. As he aged, he developed cataracts, but refused to have them surgically removed. In this 46-line free verse poem, Monet, the speaker, tries to make the doctor understand his reasons for refusing the operation.

What the doctor sees as deterioration, an "aberration" and an "affliction," is for the artist the result of a long process of development, a kind of culmination of his life’s work: exploring the way that people (rather than eyes) see. For Monet, removing the cataracts would "restore / my youthful errors" of vision, a world seen according to "fixed notions" of discrete objects rather than as the flux of pure light it has become. Monet wishes the doctor could see what he does: "if only you could see / how heaven pulls earth into its arms . . . ."

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This poem is divided into two formally identical halves of eleven lines each. The first part describes a visit to a "dissecting room," a Gross Anatomy laboratory. The female visitor dispassionately observes the four male cadavers, "already half unstrung" by dissection, and the students, "white-smocked boys," who work on them. She observes the fetuses in bottles, "snail-nosed babies," which are given a kind of power and fascination absent from the cadavers. Finally, "he," one of the students, hands her the "cut-out heart" of his cadaver.

This disturbing valentine is indirectly elaborated on in the second half of the poem, which describes Brueghel’s painting The Triumph of Death (1562), a "panorama of smoke and slaughter." The speaker focuses on a pair of lovers who, in the lower right corner of the painting, seem entirely unaware of the horrors around them. Enclosed by their love, they form a "little country," admittedly "foolish" and "delicate," but spared from encroaching death--if not by love itself, then at least by the arresting effect of art’s image, for desolation is "stalled in paint."

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"Propofol" is a 20 line poem of five quatrains each with an a-b-a-b rhyming scheme. Appearing in the June 30, 2008 New Yorker magazine, it is a description of the Classical allusions and hallucinatory experience surrounding the administration of the hypnosedative, propofol, to the speaker-patient for an undescribed medical procedure.

It involves a whimsical conversation, of sorts, between the patient and the physician. After the patient references many of the Greek and Roman materials (moly, mandragora), art ("Euphronios' famous calyx-krater" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphronios_krater]) and deities (Somnus, Hypnos, Morpheus) involved with sleep and death ("Sleep and Death were brothers"), the physician is made to ask why the patient is there - one presumes, and only hopes, he in fact knows!

The poem ends with the onset of what is known as procedural sedation ("A traveller/approached the citadel even while I was speaking,/seven seconds from my brain; then it was snuff."). The final two lines describe the image - apparently now in the hallucinating patient's head - of Félicien Rops' 1879 painting "Pornokrates", in the Musée provincial Félicien Rops, Namur, France (http://www.museerops.be/tech/drawing/pornokrates.html), the genesis of which Rops described thus in a 1879 letter to Henri Liesse:

"I did this in four days in a room of blue satin, in an overheated apartment, full of different smells, where the opopanax and cyclamen gave me a slight fever conducive towards production or even towards reproduction."[quoted at the Musée provincial Félicien Rops site.]

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