Summary:

In this domestic epic, a man and woman converse on the porch of their farmhouse. The man is just coming home in the evening; his wife meets him at the door to warn him that Silas, the old ne’r-do-well hired hand, had returned that day. She found him "huddled against the barn door, fast asleep, / A miserable sight, and frightening, too--"

Silas looked terribly ill, yet he didn’t ask for help. Instead, he told her he would cut the upper pasture, and he kept inquiring about the college boy he worked with on the farm a few years back. He and the boy argued all the time; now the old man wants to "make things right."

The husband shakes his head. No, he will not take Silas back. The old man walked away one too many times. You can’t depend on him to stay and finish the job when someone comes around offering him a little "pocket money" to go elsewhere. Indeed, Silas’s brother is the president of a bank; why doesn’t he go to his brother for help? At last the husband quiets down and goes in to see the old man, who is presumably asleep beside the stove. A few moments later, he returns to the porch. To his wife’s query, "’Dead,’ was all he answered." [175 lines]

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Published in 1734, this poem of 7-syllable couplets describes how Peter goes to visit his college friend Cassinus. He finds Cassinus filthy and miserable in his dorm room and asks his friend why he is such a mess. Cassinus replies that he is in this state because of Celia. Peter wonders if Celia has died; if she has cheated on Cassinus; if she has been struck down by some disfiguring disease; or, ultimately, if there is something terribly wrong with Cassinus. No, replies Cassinus, to each of these in turn. He makes Peter promise not to divulge the terrible secret he has discovered about his once beloved Celia, and then tells him: "Nor wonder how I lost my wits; / Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits."

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This is a collection of 61 poems by physician-poet Richard Bronson. The first and largest section contains many poems related to the poet's medical life and experience, including several that arose from his formative and bittersweet years at New York's Bellevue Hospital ("A Bellevue Story," "I Shall Be Your Vasari," and "Pain"). Others re-imagine events in the history of medicine ("The Knowledge," "Plague Doctor," and "The Man Who Dissected His Wife's Brain")

The second section, "Ten Portents of the Future," contains poems that examine the symptoms and signs of contemporary malaise, but find the diagnosis uncertain and the prognosis . . . who knows? It appears grim, though: "I am a lame man / gone to seed / at the terminus of an age." ("After the Big Bang," p. 94) In his last suite of poems, "Six Aspects of Love," written to his wife, Bronson reveals his strong, but purely personal, antidote for the cruelty of our "barbarous times."

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This is a poem that celebrates the divided self and disconnection. The speaker wonders whether his tendency to be scattered--to not "find out till tomorrow / what you felt today"--is natural, is in fact, "what makes our species great." Is this "dividedness" what allowed "surgeon Keats to find a perfect rhyme / wrist-deep in the disorder / of an open abdomen"? The poem ends with another kind of disconnectedness: a deliberate separation of self from "the whole world in unison" that is preparing itself for the onset of winter: "I have this strange conviction / that I am going to be born."

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The poem describes how drinking skewed the speaker’s perspective on life (blurring night and day distinctions, etc.) and isolated him from others. The poem goes on to illuminate the speaker’s recovery, the result not of an Alcoholics Anonymous-type "higher power" but of the speaker’s own dark epiphany: "I recognized the night as night and chose it."

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The narrator is both sympathetic observer and harsh judge, evoking the conflicting emotions, and human and ethical considerations surrounding the abortion of a fetus. The choice and juxtaposition of words is powerful and shocking: "more monster than murdered . . . autumn in our terrible breath."

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Amusing, and lovingly told in the first person, the poem describes the comically embarrassing physicality of giving birth and considers the profound implications of this life event: the sex act from which conception originates, the anguish of losing a child; the fearful joy of welcoming a new life into the world. During labor, the mother is also aware that the doctors expect her to perform, "the audience grows restive," but in the end they are of no consequence as it is "just me, quite barefoot / greeting my barefoot child."

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A woman with breast cancer describes dealing with doctors and medical procedures, from facing "embarrassing questions" to the finality of the mastectomy itself. She copes passively with the procedures by escaping into a fantasy world; but when it is time for the doctors to remove her breast, she assumes an active role and "[gives] it to them."

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A 30 year-old woman describes with chilling power her three suicide attempts. She compares herself to a cat with nine lives and to a concentration camp victim; yet "dying / is an art . . . / I do it exceptionally well." The doctors/men that save her are the enemy, and she warns them to "beware."

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This is a graphic, highly-imaged portrayal of rape involving two twelve-year-old girls.

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