Summary:

This chapbook by Kentucky poet Leatha Kendrick features a sequence of poems dealing with her experience of breast cancer and mastectomy. The "science" in the title moves from a little girl’s fascination with nature, and her insight that "all she learned was nothing / is only what you thought you saw" (p. 2); through her mature view of "these spiky shadows" on ultrasound (p. 10); to chemotherapy, where she feels "like the muck this stuff is supposed to make of the fast- / dividing cells" (p.18).

But the science of cancer fails to amputate the poet’s narrative. Early on, "My first love called them Skeeter and Bite. / Equal then, if small. Skeeter got / most of his attention." (p. 14) Later, during her treatment, "Excuse me while I grow bald and fat." (p. 21) Eventually she learns, "The map back is a flat / red road, underpinned with bone, / she must learn to dance upon." (p. 28).

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This is the second collection of poems by international health physician Norbert Hirschhorn. The first poem, "Number Our Days," is a meditation based on a verse from Psalm 90, "Let us number our days / That we may get us a heart of wisdom." The poet reflects on his mother's escaping the Holocaust ("my blond head sucking her breast"), her subsequent depressions, and eventually the day when the adult son was faced with the decision whether to dialyze his dying mother.

This poem sets the stage for the whole collection: an inquiry into the meaning of family and love and memory. Hirschhorn doesn't take himself too seriously, as in his description of adolescent lust ("Donna, Oh Donna"), the compelling "Self Portrait, "Growing up in New York / with skull caps and spittle, I felt demeaned to be Jewish / and fled to the Ivy league," and the wonderful "New Old Uncle Blues."

There are three major clusters of poems: one that deals with the poet's family and childhood; a second cycle of love, distance, divorce, and renewed love; and, finally, an engaging set of poems that focus on his experience in Indonesia and Southeast Asia. In "On a Guesthouse Veranda in Surakarta, Central Java," Hirschhorn writes, "What matters here? Nothing. / Never has life been / so sweet." And "A Non Believer Wakens to the First Call to Prayer" ends with these beautiful lines, "The men who pray raise up their palms. / Soon the sun will warm the stones."

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A nurse enters an elderly woman's bedroom. "Wake up! It's nearly five," she cries. Does she mean five AM, or is it afternoon teatime? The nurse lets the window blinds unroll and puts some coal on the fire in the fireplace.

In fact, the patient is dead. She had died the previous evening, "by the light of the ev'ning star." Setting aside her "chintzy cheeriness," the nurse begins to pay attention. She looks "at the gray, decaying face," realizing what has happened. Her response is simply to straighten up a bit and leave the room. [28 lines]

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On a summer afternoon, the poet lies in a garden under a mulberry tree. The air is "swimming with insects" and children are playing in the street. He notices a housefly being caught in a spider’s web. The spider poisons and kills the fly, then wraps it in "lithe elastic," but everything else in the garden remains the same. Life goes on as usual. The poet then turns his attention to the future. One day in some cottage hospital he, too, will approach the end of his life. Will he groan in his bed and gasp for breath, while no one notices? [36 lines]

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In her poem, "Dehiscence," Amy Haddad speaks in the voice of a nurse tending a suffering patient. The patient has "come unstitched," and, seen through the nurse's eyes, the patient's wounds are devastating: fistulas "connect bowel, liver, pancreas"; the "stench is overwhelming," telling everyone, caregiver and patient alike, that medical science has failed, that no more can be done.

Moved by her patient's suffering and her own inability to help, the nurse does what she can. She washes the patient, changes the soiled sheets, removes the dirty dressings and replaces them with clean gauze and tape. "Done," she says. Stepping back, looking from a distance, she can no longer see the patient's wounds. She "is caught," as all caregivers have been at one time or another, in "the illusion" of the patient's "wholeness."

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The poet contemplates the realities of life in the mining --now ghost--towns of Western America by exploring an old graveyard. "Eighty-nine was bad. At least a hundred / children died," the writer muses while walking among the grave markers. The reader recognizes that this settlement is no longer viable: "The last one buried here: 1938."

After describing the arrangement of the markers and the crude fence that defines the burial ground, he ponders why the graveyard is situated so far from the townsite. In an ironic reflection on the mothers' needs to get on with life after the frequent loss of young ones yet still striving to protect the little graves from greedy excavation, the poet says, " . . . a casual glance / would tell you there could be no silver here."

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The poem tells the story of one who travels to the hot springs seeking a cure for his chronic illness/disability. For 25 years the subject faithfully visits what remains of the opulent dream of spa-builders--a bubble that burst for both the entrepreneurs and their visitants. In the nearly deserted town, the poet's character continues to seek relief without success, yet he remains. The writer seems to be asking if it has become the search itself that keeps the sufferer alive; if he were to suddenly be made well perhaps he would lose everything in losing his familiar identity.

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The author of this chapbook of poems is the chaplain of a large geriatric outpatient unit in Iowa City. Her In Strange Places is a series of 23 "poem portraits," each one of them a short narrative that speaks for one of the patients who is "not to be defined by illness and years and deserve(s) to be free of the condescending devaluing attitudes" that the elderly often encounter." (p. 3)

The poems are particularly eloquent in speaking of the progressive losses of aging. For example, there is "At Ninety: Embers of a World," which depicts two elderly persons as they "decompensate in sorrow." (pp. 8-9); and "Of Late I Have Taken to Falling," in which a patient describes her recent falls, but concludes, "I shall not / fall again." (p. 16-17).

Other portraits deal lovingly with an "impressively calm" dying matriarch ("CHF and the Matriarch, p. 6) and "The Good Storyteller" (pp. 18-19), who "wants her life / to begin again / to call her out / to play her part / once more with / cleaner closets / open doors." In "Funeral Plan" (p. 22), we meet an elderly woman carefully considering the magnificent array of flowers she plans to have at her funeral, "no hot house roses please," but great expanses of seasonal flowers: "ditch lilies / apple blossoms / naked ladies . . . " and so forth.

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This small collection opens with a quotation from Mary Oliver's poem, "The Journey": "And there was a new voice / which you slowly / recognized as your own . . . " These poems reveal a new voice, which in John Wright's case, is perhaps heard best in his pastoral retreat on Decatur Island, one of the smaller San Juan Islands of Puget Sound.

Most of the poems depict scenes from Decatur; for example, the annual community sheep shearing ("The Shepherds"); a glimpse of a young girl crossing a field toward the poet's house carrying "cherry plums" (crab apples, "The Gift"); and a morning spent picking blackberries with his wife in the hills ("The Right Moves").

Other poems arise more purely from the geography of the heart. One of these is called "Praise," in which the poet confesses, "This quiet elation that comes, finally, / At seventy-one . . .

It's something akin to a leaf-bare maple, / Its upraised limbs."

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The first line of this short poem sets the stage: "It is easy to be fascinated with death." The next four lines sketch the play or tableau: "We pretend to prepare," children trying on our parents oversized clothes in front of a mirror and making believe that we are going to go out into the fancy nighttime world of adulthood. But the next line throws open our safety valve, "Yet we trust we are not truly going to dinner." In fact, it's all just a game: the clothes are really too big, our hands are much too small to handle the glasses and silverware, and we are just little kids, after all. [8 lines]

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