Summary:

The poem, a domestic epic, employs the convention of in medias res. The central issue, the death of a child, has not been addressed by the parents whose lives are in strange suspension. A staircase, where the action of the poem occurs, symbolizes both the ability of husband and wife to come together and the distance between them.

In their first discussion of this traumatic event, readers learn that the child was buried in the yard by the father during the New England winter, while the mother watched from a window in the staircase landing, stunned by her husband's steadfast attendance to the task. His energy and "carelessness" at a time when she was shaken and immobilized by grief was incomprehensible and infuriating. The husband, meanwhile, has grieved in a different way, reconciling the death of his child to fate and the caprices of nature.

When the poem opens, their separate interpretations and feelings finally are expressed, and each is surprised by what the other says. The husband speaks from the bottom of the stairs, she from a step just above the landing. Significantly, they don't come together on the architectural bridge and, when the poem concludes, readers are not assured that this marriage will regain the closeness it might have had prior to the child's death. The highly dramatic poem underscores the impact of loss and the need for communication or discussion of loss by those involved. When no reconciliation occurs, the loss intensifies to become destructive.

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The author describes war from the soldier's perspective--"we cursed through sludge . . . Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, but limped on, blood shod." The author remembers a soldier dying in poison gas. He challenges the reader: If you only knew the horrors of war, you would not repeat "the old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori."

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An old man bending I come upon new faces . . . . The old poet is asked by the young to tell of his experience during the war. In silence and in dreams, he returns to the battlefield: "Bearing the bandages, water and sponge, / Straight and swift to my wounded I go, / Where they lie on the ground after the battle brought in, / Where their priceless blood reddens the grass . . . . "

He describes the rows of the hospital tent, where one man has a bullet through his neck, another an amputated arm. The poet cleans and dresses each wound. Even though he never knew these soldiers before, "Yet I think I could not refuse this moment to die for you, if that would save you." At the end of the poem, he remarks, "Many a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded lips."

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The film covers two days in the life of Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage), a burned-out EMT (emergency medical technician) working the socio-economic underside of Manhattan. From the beginning, Frank is upset because recently all his patients have been dying on him, and he is haunted throughout by the hallucinated ghost of Rose, a young woman who collapsed on the street and died, apparently because he could not intubate her correctly.

Frank is highly stressed, he has no life outside his work, and he is self-medicating with alcohol. He tries to quit, but his boss keeps him on by promising time off in the future. In the film's first action, Frank does manage to miraculously resuscitate Mr. Burke, a heart-attack victim, but the patient winds up in the hospital with a very bad prognosis, so even that "saving" works against Frank.

Frank has encounters with numerous patients, many of them street people whose lives are out of control, some of whom are ER (Emergency Room) regulars, such as the demented young Noel (Marc Anthony). He also deals with (and is dealt with by) several highly idiosyncratic EMT partners in his ambulance rounds (John Goodman and others). Frank gets to know Mary Burke (Patricia Arquette), the daughter of the heart-attack victim, and they tentatively move toward being a couple who might help each other survive their lives.

Near the end, Frank, who knows Mr. Burke had tried to tear out his tubes during a brief moment of consciousness, and who feels he has been getting pleading messages from him to end his agonies, surreptitiously takes him off life support long enough for him to die. The physician who responds to the code decides not to attempt resuscitation of this patient who had already been resuscitated 14 times that day. Frank goes to tell Mary that her father has died (but not how), and exhaustedly falls asleep on her breast, apparently having forgiven himself because he has in some sense finally "saved" Mr. Burke.

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This is the second anthology from Donley and Buckley derived after many years of teaching "What's Normal?"--a literature and medicine course at Hiram College where they explore the cultural and contextual influences upon the concept of normality. With the first anthology, The Tyranny of the Normal, the editors focused on physical abnormalities (see this database for annotation). In this second anthology, the focus is exclusively on mental and behavioral deviations from societal norms. With this edition, Donley and Buckley present their case that, as with physical abnormalities, there is a similar tyranny of the normal that "dominates those who do not fit within the culture's norms for mental ability, mental health and acceptable behavior (xi)".

The anthology is divided into two parts. Part I is a collection of essays that introduce various clinical and bioethical perspectives on the subject of mental illness. These essays bring philosophic and analytic voices to the topic. Stephen Jay Gould's terrific essay on Carrie Buck and the "eugenic" movement in the United States in the early part of the 20th century illustrates one of the major themes that can be found throughout the anthology.

Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the majority opinion in the 8-1 Supreme Court decision that sealed Buck's fate. Gould begins his essay reminding his readers of the often referenced Holmes quote, "three generations of imbeciles are enough." He then takes us on a fascinating historical adventure that uncovers a deeper and more complicated drama that led to this unfortunate period in American history, and the tragic incarceration and sterilization of Carrie Buck.

This essay, as with other stories, poems, and drama in the anthology, contemplates the relationship between societal values and mental illness, and illustrates how society through medicine can turn to the myth of "objective" diagnostic labels as a way to compartmentalize and control behavior and imaginations that are "abnormal." D. L. Rosenhan's essay from "On Being Sane in Insane Places" further illustrates the failure of the mental illness label. Irvin Yalom's story from Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy provides an example of what is possible when diagnostic labels are avoided, when health care professionals with power turn with humility, curiosity, and kindness toward others, substantiating that these qualities are far more powerful than statistical notions of "normal."

Part II is a collection of fiction, poetry and drama. Intended as a complement to part I, part II engages the reader in the lived experience of the narrators. It is divided into six sections. Section one considers children and adolescent experience of mental illness. Included are Conrad Aiken's "Silent Snow, Secret Snow," an excerpt from Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted (see annotation in this database), and an excerpt from Peter Shaffer's Equus (see annotation).

Section two includes stories that capture the world of mental disability and retardation. An excerpt from Of Mice and Men and Eudora Welty's short story Lilly Daw and the Three Ladies are included. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper (annotated by Felice Aull; also annotated by Jack Coulehan) is in section three where women's experiences with mental disorders is the theme (these are annotated in this database).

Section four and five focus on men and mental illness. War experience is considered in the works of Toni Morrison and Virginia Woolf. Section six concludes the anthology. Alzheimer's disease and dementia are examined in Robert Davis's My Journey into Alzheimer's Disease, and in the story, "A Wonderful Party" by Jean Wood.

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In this eight-line poem, the speaker describes her own birth. Kenyon uses rich imagery and word-sound to evoke her appearance on this earth. Emerging from her mother's "large clay" as the surgeon "parted darkness," the newborn is assaulted with harsh light, noise, and a "vast freedom" that is "terrible."

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The author first presents an introduction and rationale for the concept of using creative writing as therapy, either self-prescribed or as part of professional treatment. She then provides practical guidelines for starting a journal (Chapter 3), and for beginning to write poetry, fiction, and autobiography (Chapter 7).

The text includes an accessible introduction to images and metaphors--aspects of the craft--as well as to methods of capturing dream material (Chapter 6) for use in one's creative writing. The later chapters present therapeutic writing in various contexts--as group work (Chapter 9), or in various institutional settings (hospital, nursing home, hospice, and prison). There are examples of therapeutic writing, especially poetry, throughout the book.

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One of Hemingway's war and love stories, this novel takes place in Italy during World War I and is tied closely to the author's own experience as an American Ambulance Driver for the Italian Army. The story opens during a lull in the action and the reader meets a group of men who work with the wounded during battle. In the course of waiting for action, the protagonist, Henry, meets and courts an English nurse stationed in Italy.

The core of the tale is the evolution of the love of these two in the face of increasing military involvement, including an engagement in which Henry is wounded and after his return to the front, an Italian retreat from which he barely escapes with his life. Ultimately, he and Catherine, his English love, defect and enter Switzerland to await the birth of their child. Baby and mother both die and Henry is left alone, his future left by the author unplotted.

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Summary:

This post-World War II tale is a joint reminiscence rendered by two Englishmen who have survived the war in the South Pacific, including concomitant internment in a Japanese POW camp. They meet over the Christmas holiday after a separation of five years.

The first segment has to do with Lawrence's memory of his relationship with Hara, a terror of a camp commander. The central portion of the work shifts to a document that has been saved by the narrator-author (the second of the two survivors) and was written by a mutual comrade, a South African officer who was not able to leave the prison camp alive. This is the longest and most detailed of the sections and dwells largely on the officer's relationship with a disabled brother and his assessment of how the guilt engendered by this relationship affected his entire adult life.

The third and final section is Lawrence's recall of the last few days of his service prior to his capture by the Japanese and a strange and wonderful few hours with a woman whose name he never learned. Lawrence's decision to share this very intimate secret with his host and hostess is stimulated by his view of their son sleeping with a play sword in the same room with their daughter who is cuddled with a toy--and the unavoidable reflection on the gender significance of this scene. The holiday is over and Lawrence returns to his service, leaving the narrator and his wife to review the three days they have passed together.

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Summary:

By the author's own admission, this memoir is a collection of fragments taken from her memory of bits and pieces of her four year experience as a nurse in an evacuation hospital unit following the front lines up and down the European theatre during World War I. The work is fragmented because this experience was fragmented.

The first few chapters are dream-like descriptions of the men marching into battle and crawling back, or being carried back. The second collection of short vignettes dips--just a wee bit--into some of the individual soldiers' immediate stories. The latter segment of the book deals in more detail with the operations of the field hospital, some of its personnel, and some of the patients. Finally, the author treats the reader to a handful of poems, perhaps unnecessary, since the entire memoir is like one giant poem.

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