Summary:

On surface, this metaphorically endowed poem details the life cycle of a tapeworm, beginning as a tiny resident in the "protective slime" of mucosae, eventually outgrowing the host, and overrunning the environment as it attains a "philosophical dimension / in which it's the only form of matter. . . . " The parasite shrinks again into "little spores of embecile agreement" which wait for another chance, another cycle of growth and power. The parasite metaphor works beautifully for a wide variety of social and political phenomena the poem does not identify.

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In this collection of poems, the author details her descent into the hell of bipolar disorder and the re-integration of her life, thanks to lithium therapy. In "Other Lives" she describes herself as "mother of none, good friend to all, / who for no apparent reason, / tries to kill herself, twice." She writes angrily to the psychiatrist who misdiagnosed her and prescribed the wrong medication: "Your first mistake was to see me at all. / Your second, prescribing the Elavil." (in "Shocking Treatment") While she misses the productivity and "rush" of her hypomanic episodes, she realizes this is the price she has to pay to avoid another "two years of pain or nothing, numbness."

As the author's health improves, she cares for friends who are dying of AIDS and for the dying father of a friend: "I'm learning, as I nurse / my father that the worst / would be protection from / death's reality." (in "For Jean") The collection is interlaced with a series of poems called "Black Stones" in which the author encounters very directly the reality of death. In the last of these, she cries out the words of her friend Matthew who has just died: "Rika, dear friend, live and live and live!"

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The poem depicts a fiercely wild and free woman who meets an untimely death in a motorcycle accident. The anatomy student views the cadaver as more than just "thirty-one-year-old female flesh," and fantasizes about what her life (and death) must have been like.

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Shelley compares man's ability to stay alive to the flickering light of a passing meteor. Our light of life is wavering and brief. He urges man to strive on and live life fully nevertheless.

In the third stanza, he compares earth to a mother and a nurse; it is that which comforts and sustains us and we are afraid to leave it. Again, however, Shelley argues that life must be lived anyway. Indeed, he argues that life (and poetry) is enhanced by its close relationship with death. The hopes of what will be after death must be united with the love for the here and now.

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Sea Creatures is Dr. Vernon Rowe's first collection and contains forty-eight poems divided into two sections: "Creatures of the Inland Seas" and "Out Far and In Deep." The poems are succinct and focused. Much of the imagery is derived from nature, as in the title poem, where the poet-neurologist-helicopter pilot likens his descent through the sky to a dive into a deep and ancient ocean. Poems in the first section are directly related to the poet's life as a physician; works such as "Paralyzed" "Brahms' First, First Movement" and "Wasted" are empathic portrayals of patients.

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This 14 line poem deals with a physician's compassion for a hopelessly ill patient ("An apparatus not for me to mend--") and his participation in active euthanasia. The patient, Annandale, was "a wreck . . . and I was there." The narrator asks the reader to view himself or herself "as I was, on the spot-- / with a slight kind of engine." (This "engine" is a hypodermic needle.) He concludes, "You wouldn't hang me? I thought not."

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The narrator observes that we all, from the worm to the brontosaurus, have excrement. As she cleans the horses' stalls of "risen brown buns," she contemplates that sparrows will come to pick "redelivered grain" from the manure, that mushrooms will "spring up in a downpour" from it, that "However much we stain the world," shit indicates that we go on.

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The narrator reflects on her mother's death through four sections. In the first, she recalls the moment her mother collapsed and died. Her father heard the crash but refused to get up from his nap to see what had happened. The narrator hears the crash fifteen hundred miles away and feels her mother's pain. This stanza also speaks about the Jewish funeral, held in Florida while Christmas carols play out over palm trees.

In the second section, the narrator is sorting through her mother's things. She dreams of her mother at seventeen, full of hope. The third section speaks about how much of the mother remains alive in the daughter. The same hips and thighs have cushioned grandmother, mother, and now daughter. The narrator feels as if she carries her mother inside her, just as her mother once carried her.

Section four brings out issues over which the mother and daughter disagreed. The narrator was once eager to create a life separate from her mother's. Now, though, she and her mother are one and the mother can live her life through the body of her daughter.

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In this poem, the narrator describes her father who is in a nursing home suffering from dementia. The poem opens with a description of the narrator's dying cat, with whom her father is compared. The most distinctive thing about the father's anger and confusion is his loss of power. In a home he is denied access to his money, his house, even his ability to boss others around. He calls his daughter and insists that she is not his daughter at all, but his wife.

He feels as if it's the wrong year, "and the world bristles with women who make short hard statements like men and don't apologize enough, who don't cry when he yells or makes a fist." He has lost his masculinity. He accuses his daughter of stealing his money, the money he hoarded from her as she grew up and that is now useless to him. No one on the ward remembers or cares that he once walked the picket line, worked, or had a desirable wife. He is as angry as "a four-hundred-horsepower car," but he has lost his license to drive.

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In a short 28 lines, Jarman captures the hothouse images of a bout of fever and the dreariness of an urban apartment where he recuperates under the care of his spouse. He can feel the way that, as he gets better, his wife's emotions unravel. She has suppressed her hatred of the apartment and the city--and perhaps, of his requirements of her as a nurse, despite the title's reference to marriage vows. As she cries, Jarman addresses himself in conclusion: "You have married the patient wait for exhaustion."

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