Summary:

This is the house of Bedlam. So begins the strong poem by Elizabeth Bishop, the woman who wrote of that wretched old man who lived in the house of Bedlam. "This is the man / that lies in the house of Bedlam." So go the two lines of the following stanza of the 1950 poem about the cranky old man who was kept for his crimes in the house of Bedlam. "This is the time / of the tragic man" begins the three lines of the following stanza of the nursery rhyme poem by the consummate poet who wrote of "the Jew in a newspaper hat / that dances joyfully down the ward" and the brilliantly cruel and crazy man who lived in the house of Bedlam.

"This is the soldier home from the war. These are the years and the walls and the door." So starts the 12th and last stanza of the metrical rhyming repetitive poem by one of the finest American poets about Ezra Pound, an American poet, who found himself at the end of the war "walking the plank of a coffin board" and because of his treason becoming the man--the tragic, talkative, wretched and tedious man--who lived in the house of Bedlam. [79 lines]

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This poem explores the act of inserting an intravenous line (I.V.) into a patient just prior to induction of anesthesia or sedation. The physician-narrator is initially full of bravado, stating "I am good at this" and "I'm the best". The physicality of the act is detailed: the vein "lies stretched and succulent" and the needle "waits / like a mosquito attached / by its sucker." By the end of the second stanza, however, when the I.V. has been successfully inserted, the significance of this seemingly simple medical intervention is stated: "I am suddenly aware / I am connected to his brain."

It is this power, the fear of this power felt by both the doctor and the patient, and, by extension, the fear of anesthesia or sedation, that form the heart of the poem. The narrator states that he cannot let his own fears about anesthesia and "loss of control get in the way." Instead he accepts the power and control that the patient gives him and "bring[s] him down."

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Beginning with the words, "They are and suffer, that is all they do," this poem describes the experience of those who are recovering from surgery and their treatment at the hands of impersonal doctors ("The treatment that the instruments are giving"). Suffering and pain narrow the patient's world and isolate patients who "lie apart like epochs from each other" and for whom "truth" is "how much they can bear."

The speaker also describes how difficult it is to imagine pain when one does not have it ("we stand elsewhere / For who when healthy can become a foot?"). Finally, the speaker refers to "the common world of the uninjured" where we "cannot / Imagine isolation," but share happiness, anger and "the idea of love."

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The author of this bold collection is a registered nurse who relates, through her poems, patient and caregiver experiences culled from her own years of working in Intensive Care-Coronary Care. There are 24 poems here, most running two to three pages and most written in short lines, a point of craft that adds to their power. There is not one moment of easy sentimentality in these poems. Instead, the author plunges into the grittier side of nursing and illness--and yet, in aggregate, these poems celebrate the embodied and holy work of healing.

In the opening poem, "The-Trickle-Down-Theory-Of-Health," Adam, in the Garden of Eden, is surprised by "The knife" that "separates his ribs." By poem's end, we see health slip "like a ring / from earth's finger" (2), and with this simile we are introduced to the book's underlying metaphor and also to the poet's technique: dense and sometimes near-extreme imagery that ranges, in this poem alone, from encyclopedias to acid rain to barefoot children to librarians to a patient in the dark, "her arteries and shelves / of bone in a ruby gloom" (2). This accumulation of unrelenting, unusual images recreates the world of a patient's pain and suffering and the fierce determination and occasional despair of a caregiver.

"Coma" is written from a comatose woman's point of view, and yet we also see her from the nurse's vantage. In a lovely and surprising twist, the coma becomes, for the patient, a sort of liberation as "Slowly she sloughs, / cell by cell, / the old thorn" (15). This patient is not Sleeping Beauty, who in some fairy tale might be wakened by a kiss. "On the Fireline" becomes a wonderful metaphor for the daily confrontation of illness, for the way the nurse, returning daily to tend her patients, also "coalesces into fire" (16).

The 5-page poem "Intensive Care" perfectly renders the physical sense of being alternately caregiver, patient, and family member within the rarified atmosphere of the ICU (24-28). A patient's blood "pulls against/ the moon, his breath / this tide going out" (26) and, as she comforts a waiting family member, a nurse's eyes "beyond clarity, / unfold a silken language / all their own" (28).

Other not-to-be-missed poems are "The Holy O" (36), "Prayer to a Purple God" (38), "Pieta" (44), "A Riot of Flowers" (52), "What the Body Remembers" (57), and one of my very favorites, "Anesthesia" (59). In "Anesthesia" the caregiver lets an anesthetized patient float like "an embryo / tethered on the end of IV tubing, / floated like an astronaut / in cold stratosphere, / a naked thing / alone / in the universe" (60). But since these poems are finally loving, involved, experienced and hopeful, the patient is told to hush; he is watched over; he is protected. When danger is past, he is reclaimed: "She will hold you / within white-curved wings. / She will reel you back in / when you are healed" (60).

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Voluptuousness rules begins this oval, oviparous, oracular poem about "whale women" lying around on cushions, practicing pushing the bodies of babies from their bodies into the body of the rest of the universe. Turkish music, undulant arms, bulging breasts, the rhythm of secrets, the beginning of being ready to give birth--this, my friends, is a succulent poem!

"Antenatal Class" ends not with the moralistic healthiness of the typical Lamaze class, but with the body breathing, "tasting, hearing, through armpits, hair / and speaking softly oh oh oh / in letters it shapes with its pelvis." [22 lines]

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The front cover of this collection shows the outline of Africa completely filled with the names of patients ("Tyra Lynette Deja Nya Rovert Marqui Fatima Terry Alexia Michon Ty . . . ") On the last page, poem #120 consists of an outline of the United States of America, also completely filled with the names of patients, also African. The poems in this collection constitute a journey through these Dark Continents, both of which lie within.

Kelley Jean White stakes out her territory very clearly: "I suppose I embarrassed you / at all those mainline / plastic surgery parties / talking Quaker and poor and idealism" (3). There are no elegant parties, nor plastic surgeons, after page 3. Instead, persons like Shawanda live here: "At seventeen, Shawanda has never spoken. / Her brother easily carries her frail body / into the exam room--37 pounds" (36). And the nine year old girl who delivers her baby by C-section: "The nurses said it was the worst thing / they’d ever seen . . . She took her to her grandmother’s home / to raise. / The man did time / for assault." ("Freedom," 55)

But the poet hasn’t lost hope at all. She is filled with love and humor and imagination: "I dream I’m marrying this guy I used to work with who spent a lot of money on his hair" (73). "I musta been looking pretty down / when I left you today . . . " because the legless man pulling his wheelchair to his favorite begging spot said, "love, you gotta be always looking up . . . I just smiled and looked at / my too big shoe feet" (118).

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Written while Carruth was approaching or had reached the age of 80 years, this collection understandably reflects the recognition of aging, loss, and of a changing world. Also, there are memories--of jazz and jazz players, relatives, pets, youth. And there is life in the present--with grown children, old friends, the Vermont countryside, writing, remembering, coping, not coping. Throughout, Carruth has a no-nonsense style; a mixture of straight talk, irony, irreverence, contemplation--and wonderful craft.

Carruth's adult daughter, Martha, died miserably of cancer in the late 1990s; in Part II, "Martha," Carruth describes himself as "blocked and almost silent / for two years. Titled "Dearest M --", this is a 15-page elegy that accomplishes "a release of some dire kind" (46) for Carruth, but he can't take pleasure in the release, feeling shame instead ("how shaming, how / offensive!"). Even in his mourning, Carruth raises questions about the ethics of writing such poems, and questions whom he is addressing ("not Martha. The absence / is like a hollow in my mind" [48]).

Section IV, "Faxes to William," is a series of 54 short poems addressed in "faxes" to a mysterious William: "William, do you know why / I like writing these faxes / to you? Because you / don't have a fax machine" (75). The poems instruct William about writing poetry ("some poets write blurbs, William, / and some do not. And it is by / a law of nature that the former / envy the latter desperately . . . They have unmade / their beds and they must schlepp in them" [67]); and life ("William, for the things / life didn't give us / we have no / compensation. None." [7]); and pose conversational questions ("You say I shouldn't write / so much about old age?) that have their own answers (I always / told my students to write / about what they know" [86]).

Section V, "Basho," is in dialogue with a 17th-century Japanese poet who is considered to be the best haiku poet during the time this form was being developed. Carruth's haiku-like poems in this section blend reflections on aging with reflections on writing poetry.

The final section, "Second Scrapbook," continues to explore memories ("Memory," in which Carruth learns of a former wife's death and can remember her--fondly--only as she was years ago. "My dear, / How could you have let this happen to you?" [116]); growing old ("Senility": "week after week, the mist gathering" [120]); representation ("Something for the Trade": Please note well, all you writers, editors, directors / out there: when a phone call is terminated / by the other person you do not, NOT, hear / a dial tone" [121]).

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In the Foreword to this collection, poet John Graham-Pole writes, "Children have uncovered for me the last and greatest lesson: souls thriving on failing at bigger and bigger things" (xvii). The heroes of these poems are just such children, transformed by serious illness. For example, Dominic in "Waiting" who "rests on his airbubble cot / awaiting life’s flight from its earthly beat" (10); Ruby in "Ruby Red": "And so poor Ruby meets her final test, in gentle hemolysis rolled to res" (35); the lovely young woman in "Elegy": "You’re newly dead, sans wig, / seventeen year old virgin whom / I’d loved." (57).

"I try through writing poems to lay a finger on the purpose of illness, on its pulse .  . Poems turn denial and withdrawal into compassion--feeling with. They turn fear into mercy--thank you" (xvii). The poet’s eye remains dispassionate, even though his heart may be breaking, as in "Last Rites" (32), in which a dead toddler’s father and his companion "sluice down the flooring with their hoses. After the vomit and blood the water runs clear." He understands the limits of communication about loss, but recognizes, too, that we must make the attempt; and the attempt has meaning in itself: "Afterward the circles of our talk / snap . . . - Within, we write our / separate texts of it. Between, the tension / stands: this no talk could break." ("Circles," p. 87)

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This collection by the Canadian physician-poet Kirsten Emmott includes poems on a wide range of medical topics, focusing on the physician's personal and professional growth, and the patient's experience as seen through the physician's eyes. Many of the poems deal with pregnancy, childbirth, and women's health issues. (104 pages)

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This series of 28 poems plus an envoy describe, from the patient's point of view, a 20-month stay in an Edinburgh hospital in the 1870s. The narrator delineates--from the cold and dread of Enter Patient through the giddiness of "Discharged"--his reactions to hospital personnel (from doctors and nurses to scrub lady); to his fellow patients (from children to the elderly, during bad days and holidays), to visitors, and to death.

Because he stays for 20 months, we also witness his seesawing emotions about his own state of health. The epigraph from Balzac suggests that a person in bed and ill might become self-centered, so the narrator purposefully maintains a dispassionate tone. It is a tone so distinct yet distanced that Jerome H. Buckley (William Ernest Henley: A Study in the "Counter-Decadence" of the 'Nineties, New York: Octagon Books, 1971, c. 1945) compares the poems to steel engravings.

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