Summary:

This book is a sequence of poems about Frank Goldin, a middle-aged biochemist who is admitted to a mental hospital, Elmhurst, with the chief complaint, "I hear a thousand voices and must respond to each." In the first poem Goldin confesses his sins, but simple confession doesn't get to the root of his dilemma, the existential ambiguity that plagues him.

During Goldin's dark night of the soul, his scientific self struggles with the mysterious longing within. Dr. Hudspeth, the Elmhurst psychiatrist, directs his support to the part of Goldin that says, "I am the restless biochemical cycle / that pours out glutathione in buckets." In essence, just straighten out the chemicals and you'll get better.

Throughout the book Goldin waits for his wife Helen to visit Elmhurst, but she never appears. He ruminates over the matter of confessing that he had an affair with a woman named Da-ling during a professional meeting in Osaka. If he confesses, if Helen comes, Goldin hopes that things will return to the way the way they used to be.

However, the mysterious side of Goldin is looking for something else. He has visions of the ancient Rabbi Yehuda of Smyrna, who asks, "Why do we not even know how to ask a question properly?" After several weeks Goldin leaves Elmhurst with the feeling that he has made progress, but not in any discernible direction. Goldin concludes that he should be grateful, but he asks, "to whom?"

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Helen Martin is an expert on medical art. She travels by train through Europe--Vienna, Prague, and Munich--looking for her journalist husband who has vanished for a longer time than usual. Their marriage is childless and flat. On the train, she awakens to temporary but surreal changes in her body--her breasts are enormous, her thighs huge. She meets her alter ego, Rosa, an obese and aging woman doctor, and original owner of the sizable breasts and thighs.

Rosa’s gift of a strange book-like box, containing images from Vesalius, bones, vials, leads her to many other people, including a blind intellectual, a philosophical train conductor, and a soon-to-be-murdered museum curator. These people add objects to the box, while removing others and awakening her dormant senses and identity in the process.

Helen learns that her husband disappeared while researching a story about woodblocks from the great 1543 anatomical atlas by Andreas Vesalius. The woodblocks are believed to have been destroyed in the allied bombing of Munich in World War II, but Helen suspects some have survived. She picks up the work where he left it. The rediscovery of her husband--temporarily at home in Vancouver and irritated not to find her there--comes as an anti-climax. Helen realizes she does not want him any more and boards another train to we know not where.

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The young English doctor, Mary Percy Jackson (M.D. Birmingham 1928), went to practice in northern Alberta for a year. She had been recruited by a philanthropic movement that targeted women doctors: they could be paid lower wages and would also cook and keep house. But she fell in love with the subarctic community, its native peoples, and a certain widowed farmer with two young sons, and stayed for the next seven decades.

Dr. Jackson became the only physician responsible for the well being of aboriginals and settlers in a wide radius of remote territory where winters last more than six months and the only effective mode of transportation was the horse. Married and in relative prosperity, she did not seek payment for her medical work, although she appreciated gifts in kind.

Despite the isolation, Jackson was vigilant about nutrition, vaccination, and tuberculosis control and she kept up with the latest advances in health promotion. She and her husband were active in improving opportunities for education. The film closes with a simple party for Jackson, at the local school named in her honour.

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Rembrandt painted this interpretation of the story of David and Bathsheba in II Samuel: 11 in 1654. Although the Biblical narrative focuses on David and his relation to his people and his God, Rembrandt focuses on Bathsheba and her quandary. Rembrandt conflated two parts of the narrative to convey his message. Bathsheba is simultaneously completing her bath and contemplating David's summons--the summons that will lead to tragedy.

Many critics, particularly feminist critics, have commented on the role of the female nude in western art, noting that it is rare to find a representation of a nude woman that renders the woman as a whole person. Rembrandt's Bathsheba is beautiful and haunting--in part because she is a woman thinking. In The Nude, Kenneth Clark paid tribute to this work: "[Bathsheba] is one of those supreme works of art which cannot be forced into any classification . . . Rembrandt can give his Bathsheba an expression of reverie so complex that we follow her thoughts far beyond the moment depicted: and yet these thoughts are indissolubly part of her body, which speaks to us in its own language as truthfully as Chaucer or Burns" (p. 342).

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This book is about fifteen people with AIDS whose words and images record what is happening to their bodies and spirits as they confront the reality and contemplate the mystery of certain death. Nicholas and Bebe Nixon set out to describe honestly and compassionately what it is to have AIDS; what it does to families and friends; why it is the most devastating social and medical issue of our time.

The photographs are characteristic of Nixon’s "serial portraits"--stark and formal close-ups or shallow-focused medium shots of immobile subjects taken at intervals of weeks and months with an 8 x 10 view camera. They are accompanied by comments culled from subjects’ conversations and letters by Bebe Nixon, a science journalist.

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The wealthy 49-year-old Paul Dorrance, concerned about his health, summons his doctor and a cancer specialist for an examination. They pronounce him healthy, though in need of a rest from work, and Paul begins to ponder a life of renewed vigor, perhaps in marriage with a younger woman who would bear him children. Then he discovers on the floor a piece of paper containing the diagnosis of cancer.

He believes the doctors have deceived him, and his elation turns to self-pity and gloom. In that mood he decides to propose to Eleanor, his mistress of fifteen years whom he had previously decided not to marry, for companionship in the difficult time ahead. He proposes to her the same day as the consultation, without telling her of the diagnosis (even though she knows he saw the doctors).

She accepts his proposal, and she is not deterred when he reveals the harsh prognosis. Several years later Eleanor dies of a heart attack, and Paul soon discovers that on the fatal day of the consultation she . . . had done a certain thing [which readers will want to discover for themselves] that trumps Paul's egotism and manipulativeness in the relationship.

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This is the third volume of poetry by Bamforth, a physician and scientific translator who practices in Strasbourg, France. Open Workings is precisely that--the poet opens various ideas, places, and events and shows us their inner workings. But we find that the workings are not what we expect.

Some of these poems (e.g. "Between the Rhins and the Machars," pp. 20-23) evoke Scottish folk tales and traditions. "The Fever Hospital" (p. 33) alludes to William Carlos Williams's famous poem "Spring and All," which begins, "By the road to the contagious hospital . . . " Several are set in a mining town in the Australian outback. In "A Clear Thought" (p. 39) Bamforth recalls the "scorched mesas / and camel-track droppings / of overland Australia" where he and his wife, "two transients, / (we) were crossing a language / bigger than its markers." The long sequence (30 poems) called "Doing Calls on the Old Portpatrick Road" provides a richly textured view of the life and interactions of a country doctor, one of whose patients asks, "Why do you call it failure now my heart breaks?" (p. 64)

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Magda Danvers, the brilliant English professor and scholar of Blake, is dying of cancer, "the Great Uncouth . . . my final teacher." The novel tracks the course of her illness and her husband, Francis's (who is a former Roman Catholic seminarian) untiring care of her until the end. In addition, the deteriorating marriage of Alice (who has just suffered a miscarriage) and the novelist Hugo Henry is examined alongside of Magda's and Francis's as Alice befriends Magda and Francis throughout the final course of Magda's illness.

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Narrated by Jake Baker, a 73-year-old who'd been sent to a nursing home by his niece, this novel recounts the adventures of Jake and Lucas Kraft after they leave a nursing home to become cowboys. Lucas is a writer whose pessimistic view of life is the opposite of Jake's. Never able to tell the truth about himself, Lucas has lost both fame and love but not his lust for life.

The two men hitchhike west (with a series of crazy drivers) and eventually find jobs on a Texas ranch. Jake falls in love with Betty, perhaps the foulest-mouthed cook ever invented; Lucas finds Sally Crandall, his ex-wife, a movie star, and the love of his life, who's performing in a cowboy-and-Indians movie not far from the ranch. Jake and Lucas actually do become cowboys (in the movie).

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Mrs. Seaver writes about what it is like living in a nursing home. She writes cogently about the attitudes and behavior of staff, loneliness, lack of privacy, and her day to day experiences as a disabled 84 year old nursing home resident. The contrast between her former life and still-evident wit and intellect, and the way she is treated and diminished in her current environment is profound.

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