Summary:

A series of fifty-one poems recounting the death from colon cancer of one member of "a community of four people, two women and two men--potter, woodworker, poet, musician." These poems (actually one long narrative poem) convey the full range of emotions of someone who never before had been deeply involved in the process of dying.

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This five-part poem sketches five vignettes of the poet’s life. First, he sits in the doctor’s waiting room. Second, the doctor says " ’this lump is probably nothing, but . . . ’ " Third, the poet has a biopsy. Fourth, the pathology report, which is positive, " ’But be glad / These things are treatable today . . . Why, fifteen years ago --’ " Finally, the poet is outside on the street, observing "through my / Invisible new veil / Of finity . . . / November’s world."

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When "death came in out of the cold / And laid a glove on me . . . ." the poet worked feverishly, sang angry songs, "paroled / Myself with garlands of last words." He acted as if he were the hinge of the world. The dramatics were soon over, however, when he "fell into the ocean’s arms . . . . " Later, he "crept back into life as into much / Too large a pair of trousers."

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An even-handed consideration of the essence of doctoring, this poem packs into a few short lines the paradoxes, frustrations, rewards, and dangers inherent in the profession. It depicts the doctor’s power, skill, humanity, dedication, and sometime arrogance, and the arena in which the work is done--"they are only a human / trying to fix up a human." Sexton warns that arrogance has profound consequences: "If they [doctors] are too proud, . . . then they leave home on horseback / but God returns them on foot."

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A pregnant woman describes the harmony she feels with the fetus inside her during her pregnancy. She thinks of this fetus as a child already separate from her but in sympathy with her. She compares her feelings with an eighteenth century illustration of a pregnant uterus with a little man inside. She finds many similarities with this depiction.

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Outside, on a stony street, the narrator watches as the hospital he’s about to enter materializes out of Edinburgh’s cold morning mists. The hospital is described as a place "gray, quiet, old / Where Life and Death like friendly chafferers meet." Like contemporary hospitals, it has a "draughty gloom" and loud spaces.

The narrator, who is the entering patient, follows into the hospital a small, "strange" child with her arm in a splint. She precedes him gravely; he limps behind. The narrator feels his spirits fail as he recognizes the "tragic meanness" of the place, a place with "corridors and stairs of stone and iron / Cold, naked, clean--half-workhouse and half-jail."

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This is the sixth collection of poems by Ron Charach, who is a psychiatrist in Toronto, Canada. [See annotations in this database on Past Wildflowers and Petrushkin!] Charach explores his interior landscape with insight, wit, and a prodigious ability to tell a good story. In this collection the poems hone in on the rough, crab-like appendages of mid-life--failed relationships, maturing children, and the existential confrontation with an "uncaffeinated life."

The book begins in the deep waters of outrage, "You are the last objective correlative / the great depression / at once receptive and forbidding . . . " ("Words with the Mariana Trench") Many of the book’s early poems deal with isolation and failure--"YOU NEVER FELT MY PAIN FOR TEN SECONDS." ("Squeezing the Barbarians")--the special angry detachment of love gone sour ("Could my charms have dried up so quickly?" in "Burn Ward.") Later in the book, the poet speaks of friendships ("Rocks and Ages"), life events ("Courtesy of Plastic"), and the larger social and cultural context of his life ("Appelfeld").

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An old woman dies at home. After "the young ones had gone to bed," she arises and moves around the house, doing the usual things that defined her life--putting out the candles, mending a stocking, finding a lost glove--before she falls back into her coffin and is cremated in the morning.

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These poems push at the edge of the unknowable, as in "Credo," where Dorsett concludes, "Nearer those peaks / I understand nothing, something / in the far side." Unlike many poets of his generation, Dorsett confronts reality with hope, rather than despair. He does not, however, ignore the random pain and self-delusion of human life. In "Our Father Who Art," for example, he writes, "what are we left with? Fly swarmed swamps / where our puffed-up selves promise the bog not to eat beetles . . . . "

As a pediatrician, Dorsett must frequently confront unjust and random suffering. In the strong poem "Like Flies We Are . . . " Dorsett writes, "Who can doubt the world’s amoral? / And not only to great artists: / if the briefcase had been placed / inches closer, Hitler would have died; / Anne Frank, etc. would have survived."

This acceptance is, however, only a few poems deep. Dorsett realizes that human beings searching for meaning are like his two goldfish discussing "fish religion." We can never attain the truth about why the conditions in our tank are deteriorating. Facile New Age answers merely delude us: "Modern taste in resurrections / wants fast easters with no cross / . . . Selfjesus is coming! God help us." In the end, Dorsett opts for an ecstatic reality beyond faith and knowledge, a reality in which Christ’s resurrection and the Buddha’s enlightenment both reside.

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A witty and wildly imaginative evocation of a female patient’s encounter with a male physician. The poem is full of the counterplay of eroticism and sterile technology, of the body as love object and object of diagnosis, of the doctor’s cool clinicality and the patient’s desperate neediness. To her, the doctor is an "abstracted lover" for whom she willingly lies down "while he unfolds / her disease . . . ." Orgasmically, "he warms / to his consummation" which is for him "a most enjoyable diagnosis." He is finished with her but she feels cheated--he hasn’t grasped her essence. "Don’t leave me! Learn me!" " . . . taste my living texture. / Sweat to hunt me with love, and burn with me."

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