Showing 41 - 50 of 751 Poetry annotations

Blood

Aleixandre, Vicente

Last Updated: May-23-2017
Annotated by:
Ratzan, Richard M.

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

"Blood" ("La Sangre") is a poem in Spanish by Vincente Aleixandre, a member of the Spanish intellectual group called "The Generation of '27" and the 1977 Noble Laureate for Literature. It first appeared in "En Un Vasto Dominio", a collection published in Madrid in 1962, consisting, in part, of "a series of poems on parts of the body." (page 264). The present volume is a bilingual edition with the Spanish text on the left page and facing English translations by 15 different translators (including Willis Barnstone, Robert Bly and W. S. Merwin) on the right. The editor, Lewis Hyde, is a poet, translator and teacher of creative writing. He has also furnished an introduction to Aleixandre's work and the selections in this volume in particular, based in part on his personal acquaintance with the poet. Tomás O'Leary translated this poem, the only translation of his in the book.  

"Blood" has no formal elements or rhyme scheme. In a curiously casual voice, it describes the cycle (a word never used in this poem) that the blood makes in its journey from oxygenation in the lungs to the heart - nor are these organs mentioned by name in the Spanish text of the poem - and thence to all the near and remote cells of the body in order to deliver this beneficial oxygen. Once the blood has delivered its cargo, it completes the cycle by returning as de-oxygenated venous blood to the heart, the origin of the cycle, only to begin it, and the sustenance of life, anew.

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Admission, Children's Unit

Deppe, Theodore

Last Updated: Apr-11-2017
Annotated by:
Clark, Mark

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

The speaker of this poem is a nurse who is recalling and attempting to come to terms with a disturbing clinical encounter she’d had the week before.  (I should note at the outset that there’s no indication in the poem as to whether the nurse is male or female.  I choose to think of her as female).  What had happened is that a mother had brought her five-year-old son in for treatment, and the nurse’s exam revealed that the child had second- and third-degree burns on his torso—in the shape of a cross.  The mother, weeping, confessed that her boyfriend had, as a punishment, applied a cigarette to the child’s body—while the mother had held her son.  Seeing the mother’s tears, the nurse considered offering the woman some Kleenex, but could not bring herself to do so.  The child retrieved the box of Kleenex, then clung to his mother’s skirt, and glowered at the nurse.  Then the nurse had participated with three others in prying the boy away from his mother.  In the present of the poem, a week after the encounter, the nurse attempts to deal with the guilt and shame she feels in her failure of professional decorum and compassion—at having failed to rise above her moral judgment against the mother and offer the woman basic human kindness and respect.  In confronting the chaos of her emotions, the nurse turns to a story she’d learned in high school: the story of St. Lawrence.  The significance of her attempt to think with this story can be overshadowed, for readers, by the intensity of the clinical encounter she recalls; but her endeavor is of at least equal significance as the encounter.



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Diabetes

Dickey, James

Last Updated: Feb-01-2017
Annotated by:
Coulehan, Jack

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

In the first part of this poem ("Sugar"), Dickey gives a wonderful series of images of diabetic symptoms: "I thirsted like a prince," "my belly going round with self- / made night-water," "having a tongue / of flame . . . . " The doctor preaches insulin and moderation. The poet tries to comply. He seems to accept this new life, "A livable death at last."In the poem's second part ("Under Buzzards"), the poet and his "companion" climb to a point on Hogback Ridge where they see buzzards circling. Seeing the birds of death, he reflects on his life and illness. Is all this medicine and moderation worthwhile? What will they accomplish? Regarding the body, the poet writes, "For its medical books is not / Everything: everything is how / Much glory is in it . . . . " In the end he takes "a long drink of beer."

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Dothead

Majmudar, Amit

Last Updated: Jan-06-2017
Annotated by:
Kohn, Martin

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

Dothead is Amit Majmudar’s 5th book (and 3rd collection of poetry). It is far-ranging in its reach and style, perhaps best described by the heading of its table of contents, “Kedgeree Ingredients.” Kedgeree, as one unfamiliar with the word (like me) discovers on the page facing the table of contents (in a photocopy of a dictionary page), is “a mess of rice cooked with butter and dal….” Among other (con) textual surprises in this book are an opening epigraph from Dr. Seuss- “It is fun to have fun/But you have to know how,” a passport photo of the author at about age 3 above his book jacket biosketch, and the title of the final poem in the collection, “Invocation.”  Front and center in a number of poems is the issue of identity, perhaps most tellingly in the title poem, “Dothead,” where an Indian-American teenager confronts his white classmates. In “T.S.A.” the poem’s speaker faces off against the airport screeners claiming solidarity with :
             "my dark unshaven brothers
whose names overlap with the crazies and God fiends,
             ourselves the goateed other”  (p.5)
His identity as a poet is beautifully expressed through “Steep Ascension,” a poem “for John Hollander” (the epigraph unfortunately is not included in this volume) that ends:
          “But John, I told him, beauty is a fire
                    those who burn hardest labor coldly for

and I for one will hold your labors dear,
          the music of meaning, the artistry that dares
                    to conjure walls that it might conjure doors” (p.25). 

Among his “political” poems, are two about children: one gunned down ("Lineage")  and one abused (“Invocation")” that begins:
“The arms I sing. Forget the man. there is
no other epic. Sing the arms of kids,
the ones with pustules all along their veins” (p. 100).
The longest poem, a prose poem, is “Abecedarian” that weaves together Adam and Eve and the speaker’s discovery of oral sex.  



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The Wound Dresser

Coulehan, Jack

Last Updated: Nov-23-2016
Annotated by:
Shafer, Audrey

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

The collection is prefaced and named for a poem by Walt Whitman, The Wound Dresser, annotated in this database by Jack Coulehan. In “On Reading Walt Whitman’s ‘The Wound Dresser’” Coulehan sees Whitman as a nurse tending the Civil War wounded, and, while using some of the words and language of Whitman’s poem, imagines himself moving forward in that created space of caring for patients: “You remain / tinkering at your soldier’s side, as I step / to the next cot and the cot after that.” (p. ix) The poem introduces us to all the ‘cots’ of the book – where we step from patient to patient, through history and geography, and through the journey of medical training.   The book is comprised of 4 sections without overt explanation, although there are 4 pages of Notes at the end of the book with information about select individual poems. In general, the themes of the sections can be described as: 1.) clinical care of individual patients and medical training; 2.) reflections on historical medical cases, reported anecdotes or past literary references; 3.) meditations on geographically distinct episodes – either places of travel or news items; and 4.) family memoir, personal history and the passage of time.   Many of the poems have been previously published and a few are revised from an earlier chapbook. Notable among the latter is “McGonigle’s Foot” (pp 42-3) from section 2, wherein an event in Philadelphia, 1862 – well after the successful public demonstration of anesthesia was reported and the practice widely disseminated, a drunk Irishman was deemed unworthy of receiving an anesthetic. Although it is easy to look back and critique past prejudices, Coulehan’s poem teaches us to examine current prejudices, bias and discrimination in the provision of healthcare choices, pain relief and access to care.   There are many gems in these 72 poems. Coulehan has an acute sensibility about the variety of human conditions he has the privilege to encounter in medical training and clinical practice. However, one of the standouts for me was “Cesium 137” based on a news report of children finding an abandoned radiotherapy source (cesium) in Goiania Brazil, playing with the glowing find and suffering acute radiation poisoning. He writes: “the cairn of their small lives / burst open…their bodies vacillate and weaken / hour by hour, consumed by innocence / and radiant desire.” (p. 68).   Following another poem inspired by Whitman, Coulehan concludes the collection with a sonnet “Retrospective.” He chronicles a 40-year career along with physical aging, memories of medical training “etched in myelin,” and the search for connection across that span of career including, “those he hurt, the woman / he killed with morphine, more than a few he saved.” Ultimately, he relies on hope with fitting understatement: “His ally, hope, will have to do.” (p. 97)

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The Kraken

Tennyson, Alfred

Last Updated: Oct-31-2016
Annotated by:
Clark, Mark

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

This Petrarchan sonnet of 15 lines begins as a lyric contemplation of the Norwegian sea-beast of Scandinavian mythology; but it evolves into an association of the beast with other mythological representations of invisible yet vast, destructive forces that would devour from below or swallow sojourners on the seas of everyday life.  In a broader sense, then, and by means of the mythological representation, the poem may be understood as a contemplation of ideology and blind allegiances to the status quo—which lose their destructive powers only when they are recognized for what they are.

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Tithonus

Tennyson, Alfred

Last Updated: Jul-28-2016
Annotated by:
Clark, Mark

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

“Tithonus” is a dramatic monologue that imagines the once handsome, magnificent Trojan prince to be well-advanced in an unfortunate state brought about by negligent gods and his own lack of foresight.  Exultant over the blessings of his youth, he’d asked Aurora, goddess of the dawn, for eternal life, and she had obtained Zeus’s permission to grant the request.  But Tithonus had failed to ask for eternal youth with his immortality—and neither Aurora nor Zeus had managed to recognize that this feature of the request might be important—so that Tithonus spends eternity growing increasingly decrepit.  In Tennyson’s poem, Tithonus addresses Aurora, hoping he might persuade her to reassign him his mortal status and allow him to die.

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The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke

Brooke, Rupert

Last Updated: Apr-19-2016
Annotated by:
Ratzan, Richard M.

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

This book represents the 1915 American edition of Brooke's collected poems and is introduced by George Edward Woodberry, an American critic of poetry. A table of contents of titles follows the introduction. Ninety-four poems - all rhymed and almost all of them formal - are thematically arranged on 163 pages.

Thirty six are sonnets. Most of the poems are brief, under two pages in length, and deal with love or ardor (59), death or aging (43), or various combinations of love/ardor and death/aging (33). Only three treat subjects one could call primarily medical or related to medicine: "Thoughts on the Shape of the Human Body" (p. 59), "Paralysis" (p.73) and "Channel Passage" ( p. 90). However, the threads of death, aging, the limitations of one's physicality and loneliness - no strangers to medical humanities courses - are ubiquitous.

His famous sonnet sequence of five poems composed while a soldier in WWI occurs halfway through the book under the grouping "1914." Following the poems is a biographical note by poet Margaret Lavington. There is a photogravure frontispiece dated 1914 with a reproduction of the poet's autograph beneath. The book has no index.

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the lost baby poem

Clifton, Lucille

Last Updated: Feb-01-2016
Annotated by:
Aull, Felice
Chen, Irene

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

A woman reminisces about and with a child she chose not to have. It would have been born in winter, in a time of financial hardship, perhaps to have been given up for adoption. Sorrow for the child that never was causes the woman to swear devotion to her living children, yet she does not seem to regret her decision.

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Minds Changing: Still Here

Cogan, Nancy Adams

Last Updated: Jan-12-2016
Annotated by:
Kohn, Martin

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

Chaplain-poet Nancy Adams-Cogan's 3rd chapbook of poems complements her earlier work as "a receiver of stories" (p.1). The theme for this collection of 39 poems is dementia and the poems are smartly accompanied by a number of photos by Rod Stampe.  What comes through in these poems is the deep humanity of those who struggle with memory loss—both the individual experiencing it directly and the family members or caregivers accompanying them on their journey. Adams-Cogan captures well the "many faces" of dementia and how those faces "may vary day-by-day-by-day" (p.84). The poet also takes a close look at her aged and aging selves in the poems "Myself in Decline" and "Entanglements."

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