Summary:

Whether he is bringing to life the farmers in Grant Wood's "American Gothic," or revealing the pain of losing his wife (The Lu Poems), John Stone's work always hits the mark. This collection revolves around themes as varied as music, family, the wonder and horror of being alive in the world, and Stone's own sleep disorder. There are few poems specifically about medicine: "Transplant," "While Watching His Own Electrocardiogram He Welcomes in the New Year," and "Coming Down from Prozac."

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This memoir begins in Africa, where Dr. Grim is with Médecins sans Frontières managing a meningitis outbreak in Nigeria. Conditions are appalling, but she has come here because of burnout: "so I won't be back home and in the ER" (11). Later in the book, she describes her other "escapes" from the Emergency Room, caring for war refugees in the Balkans.

The book centers, however, on life in an American emergency department, as Grim remembers it from the vantage point of Africa (where she does eventually become nostalgic for well-stocked supply cupboards and a more comprehensible chaos). She organizes her stories into a series of "Lessons in Emergency Medicine," in which she addresses the reader directly. After going through a step-by-step account of death in the ER, illustrated with several moving and alarming cases, she concludes: "Congratulations: you have successfully declared someone dead. Now, as an encore . . . you'll get to do it all over again" (28).

The ironic, even bitter, tone warns us of the difficulty of working in such perpetually crisis-ridden circumstances, but it does not conceal a vulnerability that seems necessary to doing the job well, such as when Grim has to tell a family that the father has died of the heart attack he had at his daughter's wedding: "you just stood there," she says, "looking at the corsage, the tuxedo and the pearls . . . You had no idea what to say and you don't really remember what you finally came out with" (26).

The stories are organized around several lessons: "How to deliver a baby," "How to crack a chest," "How to write a prescription" (which includes a discussion of addiction to prescription medication and a withering account of the doctor who overprescribes), and, as if it's as inevitable as the rest, "How to burn out."

By the book's final chapter, emergency medicine has merged, along with the vaccination of refugee children and the impossibility of treating tetanus in Nigeria, into the story of almost unreasonable determination in the face of endless frustration--but this, Grim shows in her final chapter, "Why I do what I do," is the point. Against this backdrop her final story, about the rescue of a child, makes its point: the feeling of saving a life explains all the rest.

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Summary:

A sudden epidemic of blindness spreads throughout an unidentified country. When those who have lost their sight are examined, however, no evidence of pathology or damage can be found. The afflicted all describe "seeing" not darkness but rather a dense, impenetrable whiteness.

Because the government believes the disease is contagious, those people initially affected are quickly quarantined in a former mental hospital that is guarded by soldiers. There, the blind are treated like lepers and live like animals. Enigmatically, the wife of a sightless ophthalmologist has been spared from going blind. She functions as both protector and caregiver of a small group of blind people. They escape their imprisonment only when their captors (and presumably everyone except the ophthalmologist's wife) lose their sight.

Life is reduced to a constant search for food. As the situation grows even more grisly, vision is not only abruptly restored but perhaps with a clarity greater than ever before. When crowds of people rejoice "I can see," the reader wonders whether their earlier loss of sight was genuine or maybe some form of psychic blindness or spiritual malaise.

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This small chapbook consists of six relatively long poems, all dealing with the experience of nursing. "What the Nurse Likes" presents striking images and juxtapositions that turn ordinary actions into mysterious aspects of healing. In "Becoming the Patient" Cortney Davis, who is "tired of being the nurse," empathetically identifies with her patient.

"The Body Flute" sings of the body itself, "I go on loving the flesh / after you die." The nurse works with the visible parts of the body--touches, washes, inserts, and smoothes--during life and death. "At death," she concludes, "you become wholly mine."

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Divided into three titled sections: "What Man Might Kill," "The Nurse's Task," and "The Body Flute," the poems in this volume detail moments in the life of a nurse who is also a mother who once [in imagination] dragged her daughter from a wrecked and burning car; a daughter who stood on the stairs and listened to her mother's voice; and a lover who is aware of how her own trained clinical gaze and the gaze of desire sometimes intersect.

The poems range from a whimsical reverse-reel footage of memories that reach back to the moment of conception in "The Smoke We Make Pictures Of" to a scene from childhood when she was rushed to the hospital and came home vowing to love like the "women in white bright enough to burn / running with me in their arms"--a love she describes as "Fierce. / Physical," to a poem that imagines the life of the murderer, to poems that let us into the intimacy of a nurse keeping vigil by the dying, cleaning shriveled bodies, attending women giving birth. "I Hear the Cries of Women" is a litany of memories of "Women in the clinic waiting room" who "wanted to please / wanted to be whole / had no choice / couldn't speak / wasn't heard."

Stark and striking, these poems revel in language that calls suffering by its many names. They alter the distances we keep on pain, reframe what we are repelled by and honor the gritty, sometimes gory work of nurses who are willing to imagine the lives of their patients and lean close over the stink of decay to bless the dying.

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Alison, 39 years old, is twice-divorced, with three children, on the verge of moving in with a man called Bobby. Her breast is sore and she is afraid it's cancer. Her mother tells her it's more likely she's pregnant. She says she uses contraceptives; her mother tells Alison that she was conceived when a condom broke.

Alison considers abortion, recalling her last pregnancy. Having given birth to a child with Down's Syndrome who died at three months, she had had amniocentesis and was told that she was carrying twin boys, both normal. When the twins were born, though, one turned out to be a girl. One twin, it seemed, had been tested twice. Although the female twin did not have Down's Syndrome, Alison began at that point to worry about luck and the uncertainty of medicine (and of life).

So now, pregnant again, she asks her mother what she should do, and is told to "trust to luck." But she is afraid that her luck has run out and she must take control for herself. A scan shows that she is carrying twins again. Only now does her mother tell her that she is in fact a twin, that her sister had Down's Syndrome and died shortly after birth--in fact, her mother admits, the midwife "did away with" her. (The euphemism carries the senses both of euthanasia and of murder.)

Hearing this, Alison decides she wants to have an abortion right away. Her doctor, thinking the problem is that she wants only one child, gives her the option of selectively terminating one fetus and carrying the other one, but tells her she wouldn't be able to choose which to keep and which to abort. She rejects the idea, imagining how she'd tell the surviving twin about her decision later on, and decides instead to "have them both and trust to luck."

As she leaves the clinic, she begins to bleed and miscarries. Later her mother tells her that she, too, once miscarried twins, and tells Alison she'll have better luck next time, because of the bleeding: "Blood, " her mother says, "is the libation the God of Chance requires."

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The aging and isolated Austin Fraser paints vividly realistic images inspired by his past; he then covers them with a filmy top coat that obfuscates the clarity. His housekeeper thinks he spoils his work with this "style."

Son of a privileged mining magnate, he spent his summers on the northern shores of the Great Lakes, and his winters in upstate New York. His model, Sara, opened her life to him, and waited. He took without giving in return. His good friend George, destined to inherit his father's China Hall, is satisfied, it seems, with a meager life in porcelain painting and selling--trite, cozy images that Austin scorns. They both remember Vivian, a beautiful sophisticate who floated through their lives one summer long ago. Austin has been away in the big city for many years, but he has a hankering to see George again. Vivian reappears and goads Austin to make the journey back in time.

Wounded in the war, George has found a partner in Augusta--a fragile nurse, haunted by her horrifying war experience and addicted to morphine. But when George is confronted with Vivian again, the peaceful stability vanishes. To his amazement, Austin discovers that George had actually married Vivian that summer, but she left him at the urging of his mother. Her return opens painful wounds. After a night of recollection with Austin, Augusta slips away. Austin waits downstairs while she overdoses on morphia. George finds her dead and takes his own life too. Austin has the bodies removed.

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What is the nature of your country? the voice of authority asks. "Its frontiers keep changing," the refugee answers. ("Refugee," p. 72) For Dannie Abse the frontiers of imagination continue to expand, though he is more than a half century into the project of poetry. However, the nature of his country remains unchanged. That country includes medicine, literature, history, a Welsh and Jewish heritage, a strong narrative voice, and intelligent wit. As Stanley Moss writes on the back cover of Be Seated, Thou, the country also includes "mystery, moral sunlight, a gift for the simple truth."

Dannie Abse's earlier volume of Collected Poems was entitled White Coat, Purple Coat (1991) and represented his work from 1948 to 1988. The present volume includes two books of new poems that were published in England between 1989 and 1998: On the Evening Road (1994) and Arcadia, One Mile (1998).

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The epigram of this poem is a quotation from The Aeneid in which Virgil describes the infants seen by Aeneas at the entrance of hell. The babies had been "torn from their mothers' breasts" and died before their time. This 96-line poem (24 quatrains) begins with the observation that there has never been a poem written in praise of an antibiotic. Poets waste their time on "emblems" rather than the "real thing."

At this point Sappho appears and conducts the author down into hell, which is somewhat like "an oppressive suburb of the dawn," and she peers across the river to see hordes of women and children who had died of cholera, typhus, croup, and diphtheria. Sappho tells her that these women should not be defined as ciphers--court ladies or washer women--but rather as women who once "stood boot deep in flowers once in summer / or saw winter come in with a single magpie / in a caul of haws." The dead were once real people with their own life stories; real women, rather than aging statistics. The author will remember "the silences in which are our beginnings." [96 lines]

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In the first section of the book ("Rejected Prayers"), Liveson proves that the prayers were not rejected; rather, they resulted in a group of thoughtful and moving poems. These poems speak eloquently of suffering patients, especially the elderly and neurologically compromised; for example, "Jenna," wearing her "diapered dress" (p. 16), "Sonnet to Sarah," who "lets her fingers trace the pattern on the wall," (p. 20), and the patient in "Praxis," whose "smile was rare but even" (p. 21).

These poems also speak passionately of social and historical pain, and of injustice writ large. Some of the most powerful are in the section called "Before the Plaster Sets," with which the book ends: "My First Death" (p. 63), "Holocaust Torah" (p. 66), and "Yom Kippur, 5760--Musaf" (p. 68).

The latter poem is a kind of contemporary re-envisioning of Allen Ginsburg’s 1956 poem "America." Jay Liveson writes, "Yom Kippur, this is serious. We sit here / hoping to somehow tune the engine / or at least check the map." Is tuning the engine enough? Perhaps we are fooling ourselves; much more needs to be done. How can we be content to sit and tune the engine in this unjust world? Perhaps the poem that speaks this theme most eloquently is "Statistical Causes of Traumatic Shock Syndrome in Gaza--Chart VII" (p. 72).

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