Summary:

A young art student falls off a ladder and literally lands into the arms of a middle-aged doctor. Daisy Whimple is a poor, homeless woman with multiple body piercings. She has volunteered to decorate the Gynae Ward of the hospital where she had once been a patient undergoing surgery for a complicated abortion.

Dr. Damian Becket is an obstetrician and gynecologist. He is a lapsed Catholic who is separated from his wife. Becket is interested in modern art and attracted to an art historian, Martha Sharpin. The hospital has a collection of medical antiquities in need of cataloging. Some of the pieces are treasures but others are horrible relics. Martha is in charge of organizing the collection, and Daisy is paid to assist her.

Because she has nowhere to live, Becket invites Daisy to stay at his apartment. They make love every night for one week until she leaves. While attending an art exhibit, Becket and Martha spot a sculpture of the goddess Kali. The figure is comprised of artifacts "borrowed" from the hospital's collection including prosthetic arms, antiquated instruments, and body parts. It is designed by Daisy.

The sculpture is not the only unexpected thing created by Daisy. She is pregnant by Becket. Daisy requests an abortion but he insists that she have the baby. The pregnancy is almost miraculous given the damage done to Daisy's fallopian tubes from her previous abortion. It turns out to be a difficult delivery and Becket must perform it since he is the most qualified obstetrician at the hospital. The baby is a healthy girl. The newborn child radically changes the lives of Daisy, Becket, and Martha, yet the three of them have no clue what to do next.

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For those who have enjoyed his previous collections, this edition of new and collected poems (22 new, the rest culled from collections published from 1972-1998) will be a welcome and rich sampling of Stone's work, wide-ranging in style and subject. The three sections of new poems include a series about incidents in Serenity Gardens, his mother's nursing home; a series of "Reflections from the Middle East" that chronicle moments evocative of classical and biblical story and ethos as well as touching, comic incidents in the life of a 60-something tourist; and a short series of poems based on memories from childhood and young adulthood.

The poems tend toward narrative; many are little stories complete with plot in one to two pages of short lines; Stone's gifts for both chronicle and condensation give many of the poems a lively tension: what is told suggests how much isn't.

As a collection it is possible here to trace the stylistic development from the early poems in The Smell of Matches with their strong autobiographical focus and sense of intimate scene and situation to the recent ones, still strongly personal, but reflective, sometimes ironic, with lines that render the self-awareness of the older poet in sometimes comic flashes.

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In this collection of poems, Alan Shapiro looks unflinchingly at his brother David’s illness and death from brain cancer in 1998. David was an actor and a "song and dance" man on Broadway, hence the title and the frequent allusion to songs and show business. The poems trace an arc from the two boys’ childhood, when they dance together lip-syncing to Ethel Merman’s "There’s No Business Like Show Business" ("Everything the Traffic Will Allow," p. 1) through the diagnosis of brain tumor ("Sleet," p. 8) to the poet’s "Last Impressions" after his brother’s death (p. 57).

The everyday, ordinary world bursts its seams as the poet sits in a radiology waiting room waiting for his brother to return from his "Scan" (p. 10) The poet tries to watch a basketball game on TV, but "soon as my brother’s name / was called" a woman sitting next to him begins to tell the story of her husband, who has turned into "a well trained zombie." Soon his brother David moves toward zombie-hood as well. In "The Phone Call" (p. 23), he listens to "the mangled speech, aphasic / pratfalls halfway through the / sentences . . . " that tells him "you can’t imagine it at all."

But brain damage doesn’t mean the loss of wisdom. In "The Last Scene" (p. 33) the poet sits beside his dying brother, who bestirs himself from somnolence to ask, "Do you think / you have a / problem?" "Look at yourself," he says, "how you sit here / drinking all alone."

David dies without missing a beat, according to the script, but his brother loses his place in the text; he simply doesn’t know his lines. In the beautiful "Broadway Revival" (p. 43), he concludes, "I play / the brother / who doesn’t know his lines, / and you the actor / who waits there in the wings, / who holds the script, / who knows it all / by heart and / will not say."

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Megan is deaf, but has managed to make a comfortable niche for herself in her neighborhood as well as being a force to be reckoned with in a family where she wants no pity and insists on as much independence as possible. The summer Cindy moves in down the street is full of changes for her. Their friendship teaches both girls new skills in giving and receiving help, understanding, and loyalty.

Cindy needs to learn when and how to offer help. She also learns sign language. Megan needs to learn how to receive the concessions and help others offer without defensiveness. When the girls go to camp together they are taken under the wing of a counselor with a deaf sister who knows how to sign and who integrates them into camp life gracefully and protectively. Their friendship is challenged when Megan meets Lizzy who is also deaf, and who therefore shares common ground with Megan in ways Cindy can't.

The three girls form a bond, but not without rivalry and misunderstanding. After a period of estrangement during which both Megan and Cindy have to reevaluate their strategies of giving and receiving help and leadership, they reaffirm a friendship that involves a new maturity in understanding the demands of real inclusiveness.

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Steven is a gifted junior high school drummer with an imagination that takes him some distance from his writing assignments into musing on his own life. The book chronicles his experience of the year his five-year-old brother, Jeffrey, was diagnosed with leukemia. The shift from consuming preoccupation with preparation for a drumming contest and competition for a particular girl's attention to radical concern about a brother he has primarily regarded as a pest takes him through ruminations both profound and hilarious.

Jeffrey's illness oddly makes Steven an object of his friends' admiration and pity, neither of which he thinks he wants or deserves. His priorities and plans begin to take a back seat to working with his parents to get Jeffrey through treatments, in the course of which he meets a girl at the hospital who teaches him a new level of friendship before her own disease gets the better of her and she dies. The story ends with Jeffrey's return home, an uncertain future, and an altered perspective on life for Steven who finds himself able to love in ways he hadn't imagined.

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Winterbourne, an American who has been living in the decorous city of Geneva, visits his aristocratic aunt in Vevey (Switzerland) and there meets a lovely American "girl," Daisy Miller, traveling with her ineffective mother and undisciplined younger brother. Daisy puzzles Winterbourne by her apparently artless combination of "audacity" and "innocence," as when she arranges that he should take her, alone, to see a castle. Later, in Rome, Daisy befriends what Winterbourne's aunt calls "third-rate Italians," in particular Mr. Giovanelli. She refuses the anxious advice of her friends in the American "colony" there, and her adventures escalate: walking alone with Giovanelli, unsupervised tête-à-têtes with him.

When Winterbourne finds Daisy lingering with Giovanelli, near midnight, in the Coliseum, he is relieved that the enormity of her behavior here allows him to place her at last, but he warns her of the "villainous miasma" of the arena nonetheless. Sure enough, Daisy sickens and dies of malaria--but a word from Giovanelli at her graveside convinces Winterbourne that he and the others wrongly condemned her all along. Daisy Miller was, after all, not "bad," but simply a "pretty American flirt."

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Just as the new plague that will eventually become known as AIDS begins to exact its toll on the gay community, William and Terry slide somewhat unintentionally into a committed relationship, complete with a dog. Terry has issues with the modest size of his penis; being "married" absolves him from performance anxiety.

Almost equally furtive, William has inherited polycystic kidney disease from his mother and is on dialysis, with the severe dietary restrictions and merciless thirst that it entails. William professes to Terry that size doesn't matter, but he indulges in elaborate fantasies about Peter Hunter, a well-endowed star of porn magazines; he becomes an obsessive collector of Hunter's work.

Terry and William are insulated by their singular bond from the havoc of AIDS, but William finds himself compelled to hunt the stigmata of that disease in photos of the exposed and hidden portions of Hunter's anatomy. When he realizes that motorbike riders are prone to becoming organ donors, he cultivates a fascination with their behavior and their machines, following them in his car and tracking statistics. Finally, a matched biker kidney is found for William, but the immunosuppressive drugs, which are given to help him tolerate the transplant, make him very ill. He is admitted with opportunistic pneumonia, ironically, to an AIDS ward.

More than once William says, "I went to sleep next to someone I knew and I woke side by side with a stranger," The book closes with a surreal dream-like sequence, as William takes leave of his lover. It could be continued life, readjusted by this brush with mortality toward a bold new freedom. On the other hand, it could be death itself, and the story suddenly becomes the memoir of a ghost.

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Rafael Belvedere (Ricardo Darin) is a 42 year-old, divorced, father who runs the restaurant that his parents established nearly fifty years ago. His father, Nino (Héctor Alterio), is mostly retired and makes daily visits to the hospital where his wife, Norma (Norma Aleandro), has been placed for her Alzheimer's disease. Avoiding the horror, Rafael has not seen her in a year.

Guilt for having dropped out of law school drives him to prove himself by making the business a success; he defiantly resists offers to sell. But his finances are a mess, his temper thin, and his relationships strained; he works too hard, sleeps too little, and drinks and smokes too much. Inevitably, Rafael has a massive heart attack and spends 15 days in ICU (Intensive Care Unit).

This intimation of mortality convinces him to change his life, sell his restaurant, and open his heart to the needs and worth of the people around him. He agrees to help his atheist father fulfill a romantic wish to finally marry the still beautiful but grievously departed Norma in a church, something she had long desired and he had always refused for his "principles." The priest declines the request because of Norma's disease, but an engaging solution is found.

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The now famed American poetess, Sylvia Plath (Gwyneth Paltrow) is a Fulbright scholar at Cambridge, England in 1956. Angered over a stinging review of her work by the literary roué Ted Hughes (Dennis Craig), she is then charmed by his poetry and blatantly sets out to seduce him. They marry soon after.

Sylvia had tried to commit suicide several times in her youth. Recalling one terrifying near miss, her cold-seeming mother resents Hughes, sensing the power in passionate love to harm her fragile, brilliant daughter. The initially torrid life that Ted and Sylvia share in both America and in rural Britain, grows tired through the strain of two children, her lack of joy in teaching, and his greater poetic success, all of which seem to stifle her creativity.

It ends because of his chronic infidelities, reduced in this version to a committed affair with a mutual friend, the thrice-married, Assia Wevill (Amira Casar), who becomes pregnant. Rage, jealousy, and depression become Sylvia’s muse. The more she suffers with Hughes, the more productive and poignant is her work. Unable to lure him back, she leaves buttered bread and milk for her children, seals the kitchen, and gasses herself to death.

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Summary:

The summer before her senior year of high school Julie Weiczynkowski qualifies for the Olympic developmental program's regional soccer team. She has every reason to believe she will be recruited by coaches from the best college teams in the country. But her elation is short-lived; the very day she returns home from soccer camp, she learns that her father has untreatable pancreatic cancer.

The story of that summer, told in Julie's journal entries, gives us a close-up look at her own stages of accommodation, and at the skills and strategies she develops to cope with her own grief, to support her mother, and to help care for her father. Each person in the family--mother, grandmother, siblings, and uncles--has a different perspective on and reaction to the crisis. Julie finds herself looking at the rest of her life as if through the wrong end of a telescope, and finds herself alienated from the boy who has been her best friend and support in high school.

The hospice workers who come to help her parents, though she finds their presence invasive, teach her a good deal about what dying looks like and how to bear with the one who is suffering. She travels a painful learning curve to arrive at a place of acceptance, claiming her life after her father's death, and reclaiming a friendship that matters to her on new terms.

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