Summary:

After an argument with his wife, Dunn’s narrator considers differences between his instinctive male response to differences, and reliance on words. She always "argues beyond winning," "skewering him into silence." Next day she has forgotten her words, while he remembers each one wondering "if recovering from them is possible."

As a boy in the schoolyard he learned to argue with his fists, while she and her girlfriends [were] "learning other lessons." He, like other boys/men, didn’t use and is unable to perceive that her words, however wrong, derive from "much hurt and love." So what’s going on here? He is silent, resentful, feeling a need to strike or punch. She, on the other hand says to excess what she feels, using words, the skills she learned as a girl.

View full annotation

Summary:

A mother reflects on the significance of her daughter’s anticipated departure for college. She compares how she felt before the birth of her daughter--unable to imagine what life would be like with her--and how she feels now, unable to imagine life without her. Since her birth, the child has been an essential part of the mother’s life, "like food or air . . . like a mother."

View full annotation

Summary:

May the Lord Jesus Christ bless the hemophiliac’s motorcycle, the smell of knobby tires . . . This long-lined incantation of a poem takes the reader from the motorcycle raceway to the Kanawha River to the "oak tops on the high hills beyond the lawns" and, finally, to the hospital wards and the writer’s elderly roommate, who reads his grandson’s Bar Mitzvah speech. Isn’t it dangerous for the hemophiliac to ride in motorcycle races when even "a mundane backward plunge on an iced sidewalk" can bring him to the hospital bed and the "splendor of fibrinogen and cryoprecipitate"? Of course, but why not do so anyway!

This poem is a psalm, a paean of praise and gratitude to God--gratitude for oaks, and hills, and catbirds, and star clusters. "I want to hymn and abide by, splendor of tissue, splendor of cartilage and bone." The poet is also listening--listening for the presence of God in the silence: "may He bless our listening and our homely tongues."

View full annotation

Summary:

These poems offer a rich series of impressions of the speaker's present life, surrounded by family, a garden, and pockets of natural life that evoke memory after memory of a childhood lived in relative poverty with a father whose years as a coal miner damaged his lungs and finally killed him. Allusions to his chronic and worsening illness and his death thread through the poems like a long shadow.

Recurrent images of his blood-stained handkerchief, his coal-smeared face and hands, are echoed in images of the death of an uncle, the deaths of animals, and of a mother strained by poverty and taking frugal measures to preserve small things. The final poem in the collection recalls her in old age, barely able to see, but still "stitching it all together."

The title poem, one of the best, pauses over the famous idea that the flutter of a butterfly's wings might be the source of large effects continents away. Together the collection invites us, without sentimentality, to consider how things are connected over time and come together in memory in compositions one couldn't have anticipated.

View full annotation

Summary:

This collection of contemporary poems published by the National Association for Poetry Therapy Foundation is accompanied by an introduction and materials for use in support groups and poetry therapy groups dealing with loss and grief. Organized under the rubric, “Seasons of the Heart,” in sections entitled “Autumn,” “Winter,” and “Spring,” they reflect a range of responses to loss, both sudden and gradual.

Poets include Rainer Maria Rilke, Naomi Shihab Nye, Billy Collins, William Stafford, Denise Levertov, and other well-known and widely anthologized poets as well as some less known, but well worth reading. The poetry is skillfully selected, of consistent literary quality, and the accompanying materials helpful in suggesting ways and reasons to enter into the work of reading and writing poetry in time of loss.

View full annotation

Summary:

"Mercury" is a 41-line, free-verse poem divided into three stanzas. Although the narrative is filled with highly personal images, the poem's story is told from a third person point of view which serves to universalize the poem's theme: the often mechanical struggle of a couple to achieve pregnancy, and the fragility and innate sadness of that struggle.

In the first stanza, the poet sets the scene--a couple who rely on the daily reading of the thermometer that "measures their mornings / against a brimming point" (p. 44). When the thermometer indicates that "seed / and egg might meet and link" (p. 44) the man and woman have intercourse, but all sensuality has been "banished, by this elusive / goal: the child they lack" (44).

The second stanza, which is the briefest, gives us the likewise brief coupling of this man and woman, a stanza devoid--like the compulsive act--of spontaneous love or passion. A calculated sex-cry--"Baby, / Baby"--seems to be a cry both of their present desire and of their memory of a once--passionate relationship (44). The final lines leave the woman lying rigidly in the position her doctor has prescribed.

The final stanza brings a surprise. Suddenly there is the "crack" of a bird hitting their sliding glass door--"a spray of feathers splays / it's fist on glass" (p.44). Forgetting for now the need to lie still, to enhance her own chance for pregnancy, the woman rushes to the door, remembering the house finches that have nested in their yard--a gestation perhaps at first more successful than hers. "Seed seeping / down her thighs, the woman gathers / feather by feather / the splattered down, / cupping fragments tight inside / her empty fist" (45). The bird's death, in the midst of the promise of parenthood, parallels the nothingness inside the woman's fist, the perfect metaphor (as the non--gravid uterus is the size of a woman's clenched hand) for the emptiness of her womb.

View full annotation

Summary:

Gaudeamus Igitur was read by Stone as a graduation address for the class of 1982 at Emory University School of Medicine. The poem begins with "For this is the day of joy," and ends with, "Therefore, let us rejoice." Between these two lines, Stone (both poet and physician) piles image after image, detail on detail, paradox on paradox: "there may be no answer," he writes, "For you will not be Solomon / but you will be asked the question nevertheless." He writes about the sorrows ("For whole days will move in the direction of rain") and difficulties ("For the trivia will trap you and the important escape you") of medicine, as well as about the joys of medicine ("For there will be elevators of elation").

View full annotation

Summary:

Gravy is an unvarnished statement of gratitude. The poet is grateful to be alive "these last ten years . . . / sober, working, loving and / being loved by a good woman." Eleven years earlier, he had been told that he would die soon, if he didn’t quit drinking. He quit, met a woman, fell in love. "After that it was all gravy." When he was told that cancer was "building up inside his head," he told his friends not to weep for him. "I’m a lucky man."

View full annotation

Summary:

The speaker addresses her 20-year-old daughter, who has just lost her best friend in an automobile accident. This elegant five-part poem is a reflection on grief, as well as on the bond between the mother and daughter.

View full annotation

Summary:

Gorgeous Mourning is a sequence of 72 short prose poems; each one a reflection--or investigation or explosion--on the single word that constitutes its title. Cycles within cycles--the cycle of individual leaves of poems from the beginning of the book to the end; the cycle of creative energy that springs from the word that identifies each poem; the cycle of relationships amongst the poems. Every aspect of this book "fits," but at the same time its "fit" is surprising and often "off."

Take, for example, the title, "Gorgeous Mourning." The front cover is a lustrous image of autumn leaves, close-up. Beautiful? Yes. But is it "morning"? It may be, nut autumn suggests the day’s ending, the year’s ending . . . more "mourning" than "morning."

"Mourn" (p. 22) reflects, "Ordinary, because everyone is full of loss . . . Lovelorn. Unformed, words for what’s gone down the drain. I thought we would have years." In "Wonder" (p. 27) the poet confesses, "I don’t have a clue. I thought I knew more than that . . . Maybe something will unfold like hose embryos morphing into form that can breathe." In the face of cancer she considers the word "Expunge" (p. 58), "Never having suckled a child she thought breasts were a waste of time to begin with. After the mastectomy, she refused to remember what his love letters said . . . "

View full annotation