Summary:

This poem is one of several by Stephen Dunn in which the dynamics of married life are examined. The speaker begins by saying that in marriage "anything that can happen between two people" eventually will, including things that cause incredible hurt and pain. The couple portrayed in the poem stays together through tacit agreement; whatever the hurtful event, neither refers to it. Instead, conversation centers on harmless subjects such as the garden, work, and little aches. While living together in the same house, the couple remains separate because forgiveness is not forthcoming for the spouse who trespassed.

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In this story, Earth's inhabitants have moved below terra firma where their every need is met and every act controlled by "the machine." A young rebel protesting against the loss of authenticity and the reverence for abstraction seeks to communicate with his mother about his need to go to the surface of the earth. This act of direct experience terrifies his mother who is sure that her son will be sentenced to "homelessness." The son does experience the beauty of the earth and returns to prophesize the end of the machine and the "civilization" it created.

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This is a compact, strikingly vivid poem about fate--"what comes about apart from trying . . . generally of misfortunes." The narrator speculates about the story behind the single red high heeled shoe found alongside the highway. Misfortune is likened to an act of nature--being struck by lightning--a capricious event which alters one's life forever after.

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The "four voices" of this collection are Lila, her grown daughters Jennie and Sarah, and Jennie's daughter, Kate, whom Sarah has raised as her own. Sarah is a potter, and she gathers the women of the family together each year for the "vigil" of the wood-kiln firing of the pots she and her assistants have made during the year.

What the voices reveal is the story of, in Gibson's words, "three generations in a family shaped by alcoholism"--that is, the alcoholism of Jennie and Sarah's father, who is now dying in a hospice. Each woman holds secrets, and they reveal the secrets to the reader and, slowly, to each other as the story unfolds--secrets about the death of Jennie and Sarah's brother, about Jennie and Sarah's relationship to Kate, and about Kate's pregnancy.

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This is a generous and good-natured pastiche of a narrative poem evoking a "typical" Chekhov story and crowded with many of Chekhov's favorite images, settings, and situations. It begins: "Sunset clings to the samovar, abandoning the veranda, / but the tea has gone cold, or is finished . . . . " In the country house, Varvara Andreevna, Maximov, Dunia, Erlich, Kartahov, and Prigozhin (the doctor) carry on their ordinary business in the "oppressive midsummer twilight . . . . " Does Varvara Andreevna love the doctor? Does Erlich love Natalia Fiodorovna? Is anything going to happen? The poem ends: "In the provinces, too, nobody's getting laid, / as throughout the galaxy."

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The title of this volume is taken from William Carlos Williams's Patterson, where the spray over the falls on the Patterson River "brings in the rumors of separate worlds." In the Introduction Coles evokes his friendship with Williams and Williams's vision as the stimulus for this poetry.

The first section consists of poems evoking incidents and people from the author's childhood. The second section includes a number of militant poems from Coles's 1960's work with black children in the South, and later poems dealing with Nicaragua and Northern Ireland. The final section, entitled "On the Day Jesus Christ Was Born," is a set of Christmas poems evoking various times and places in the poet's life.

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The speaker describes burying a pet cat, and evokes the feelings she and her companion experience at the time, and the following day. They bury the cat with its bowl--hence the title.

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The narrator remembers a science fair she participated in as a child. The projects presented were diverse. One boy weighed mice before and after killing them in order to measure the weight of the soul. Another made an atom smasher. A girl made cookies from Euglena. The narrator rubs the tar of cigarettes into the shaved backs of mice in order to discover the tremulousness of life.

The narrator says she recalled the fair because the dusky seaside sparrow just became extinct, though its cells are frozen at Walt Disney in case it is ever learned how they may be cloned. She concludes by noting that the cookies won the prize.

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The book is a collection of 17 short stories, all of which center on physicians. "His First Operation" is about a student’s first view of surgery. He promptly faints. "A False Start" is about a doctor trying to establish a practice. He only succeeds by giving up the opportunity to treat the richest man in town, as he is the patient of another doctor. He and the doctor he thus honors become partners.

"The Doctors of Hoyland" deals with the issue of female doctors. Dr. Ripley has an established practice in Hoyland and when a famous doctor moves into the neighborhood he is secure enough to go visit him and offer him welcome. "He" turns out to be a woman, Dr. Smith.

Dr. Ripley is outraged; he thinks female doctors are a biological impossibility. Any woman who becomes a doctor must be unwomanly, otherwise how could she stand the sight of blood or inflict necessary pain? The woman doctor is courteous, but shows him the flaws in his thinking. The two are only reconciled when she is forced to treat his broken leg. He discovers how graceful, womanly, and skilled she is and asks for her hand, but she turns him down.

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De Quincey was a well-known 19th century English journalist and essayist. He was orphaned at a young age and sent away to school, where he was successful but bored and soon ran away. He then spent several years living as a vagrant in Wales, then London. In London, he was reunited with an old family friend who supported him financially and sent him to study at Oxford.

At age 28, De Quincey began to use opium (mixed with alcohol in the form of laudanum) regularly to treat his severe stomach pains. Though his intake was moderate at first, he soon became addicted. At first he rationalized the use of the drug. Later, he experienced opium-induced stupors in which he could not distinguish dream from reality nor note the passage of time.

He also developed memory loss and long periods of depression. He resolved to wean himself from the drug and did so, although in the final version (1856) of this memoir he admits to having slipped back into addiction a number of times.

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