Poems Books

Just to preface the fact that this review is a little biased, I am one of the writers who contributed to this book.

However I do think that I can speak for what I thought of the collection as a whole. This project has been in the works for a number of years now, and I have been eagerly awaiting it coming out.

Since getting the book, I have been amazed at the depth and breadth of the poems contained in this anthology. I have found some of them heartwarming and some of them frankly disturbing, but they all evoked something from me, and that I find to be valuable.

I loved that these poems address the training experience from different viewpoints. Many of the poems contained within are from the mind and heart of the medical students, physicians, etc, while another group comes from inside the patient's soul. It is this complex interaction developing between the poems that I have found to be the most intriguing to me.

I hope to have the opportunity to hear more from the voices of my fellow poets in the medical field.

Reading "Body Language" brings the reader into a world that is completely unfamiliar to most of us, the world of medicine. It's a compilation of poetry written entirely by doctors. The poems explore their world, a world of sixteen hour days, catheters, and mental patients. While this world is unfamiliar to me, except occasionally as a patient or family of a patient, these poems bring me right into the action. I feel like I am an intern working a sixteen-hour day who has not seen my mother in months.

The poems are magical in that they explore something wholly different from our day-to-day experiences. The subjects of these poems are not flowers or beautiful women; they are the gritty truths of life as a doctor, and they bring the reader right into that OR. The doctors write of unfamiliar or even scary subjects in a way that speaks to universal human truths and emotions. They explore love, loss, death, relationships, exhaustion, and aging, all things that are a part of our day-to-day lives.

The beauty of this compilation is that it brings the world of the young doctor, the intern, to life in a way I've only before seen on television. These doctors, masters of the scalpel, are also masters of the pen.

Poetry, without question, is a tricky thing. For many Americans it is an inapproachable art form that resides in a fortress guarded by elitist intellectuals. For the minority of Americans who read it, it is a personal thing--tough to define what works for some readers and tougher to understand for most. For the occasional reader of poetry, the favorite poem is usually something that sparks a familiar memory and puts it in perspective--a first love, the sight of the moon rising over a ridge in the mountains in the winter or the memory of a summer night in youth. For those of us that don't read much poetry it is the commonality of experience buried in the words speaking to something deep down inside of our common existence as humans that's tends to attract us to a poem.

While the language in many of the poems in Body Language is striking, what draws the physician reader in more than anything else is the commonality of experiences inherent in these works. There are many remarkable landscapes in these poems, from the struggle to understand the intricate detail of the human body in anatomy class to the indelible memories of the manic patients or hopelessly depressed during psychiatry core clerkship. It is mostly all here, in the form of poetry, evoking those moments that most physicians have painfully internalized or stepped around or ignored for the lack of time to pay any attention to. For some these things have become shadows and for others scars and for many, things they just never understood very well to begin with and don't want to think about much any more. These are poems about all physicians as much as they are about those of the physician poets that wrote them. This book brings important experiences back, whether sadly, bluntly, humorously or subtly, in a way that reminds physicians of all the things they've been blessed and cursed to see and be part of.

Body Language was the "brain child" of Neeta Jain, currently an R3 at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, when she was still a medical student at University of Rochester School of Medicine. She collaborated with another medical student at Yale University, Dagan Coppock with the support of her U of Rochester faculty advisor, Stephanie Brown Clark. While still 4th year medical students, Neeta and Dagan solicited submissions from students, residents and attending physicians from across the United States, receiving hundreds of submissions. Ultimately they culled out around 90 poems to create this anthology.

Perhaps I am cynical or perhaps I just don't really believe that given the frantic nature of modern medicine, that there are many doctors that can devote the time to polishing their poetry in the tradition of William Carlos Williams, a New Jersey General Practitioner who practiced prior to the era of information overload. Williams wrote on a typewriter in between patients, during the time doctors now reserve for looking up a question, returning a phone call or answering an old email.

But I was wrong. I came home from work exhausted one recent evening and picked up the book to discover another world, however familiar that world was. In that world are poems that occasionally jump off the page. Many of these poems are written by serious poets, poets published long before this book came along, and some are written by relative novices. But what unites these poems is the power--the raw emotion--of so many of the experiences described. We're reminded of overwhelming fatigue so harsh one envies the dead or the mundane call to pronounce a patient's death before fading back into the halls of the hospital. It is all here, experiences in training and in the practice of medicine.

The anthology is divided into six sections:
Medical student, first year; Medical student, second year; Medical student, clinical years; Intern; Resident; Attending. It is almost impossible not to find a situation or emotion in a poem in each section that all physicians have experienced at some point in their lives. For example, life that occasionally interjects itself into the mind numbing lecture hall of our pre-clinical years of medical school (Richard M. Berlin):

Medical School Lovers
One morning, while disease-slides flashed
and filled the lecture room with twilight blue,
the back door opened a sliver of light
and they entered holding hands.

A few of us turned, then the others,
four hundred eyes focused
on the couple at the door,
faces still flushed from making love,

their pleasure so certain.
The slides flashed on
and the lecturer persisted
but we were gone for the day,

Still dazed by the way love can enter
our lives in a flash of light,
spinning our heads as we struggle
with lessons everyone learns in the dark.

And for residents, the "soft" admit in the night (Mindy Shah):

MAO
It's what we call
a "soft" admit,
which means
your illness does not
impress us.
Here is your room,
the toilet, your bag
of personal belongings.
The toothbrush is
on us.
We'll round at seven,
but I can tell
by the smell of your breath
you're going to live.

To summarize, after reading this book cover to cover, I was not surprised to learn that Garrison Keillor had picked up a copy and had asked permission to read some of its contents on his radio show--Writer's Almanac. It is great stuff that speaks about many of the things doctors have been through that they're too tired or too busy or too afraid to stop and ponder over the years of practicing medicine. I highly recommend the anthology and congratulate Neeta Jain and her co-editors on a tremendous achievement.

Stolen Kisses (by Emily Osborn)
The fresh-laundered smell
of a boy's shirt
startles me
leaning closer
with my stethoscope
I pretend to hear a murmur
soak in the odor
of a kiss

I was fortunate enough to hear Ms. Clifton read from this and other works at a small reading in Southern Maryland a few summers back...her rich, resonant voice was the pefect accompaniment to her heartfelt-yet-spare language. In the "Clark Kent" series of poems in this collection, she slays the reader in a single line that cuts through the pretty prose one might find in another poet's work, arriving at the heart of disappointed love ("the question for you is/what have you ever traveled toward/more than your own safety?). In another favorite, "still there is mercy, there is grace," she celebrates the quiet, filling grace of god (how otherwise/could i, a sleek old/traveler/curl one day safe and still/ beside You/at Your feet, perhaps/but, amen, Yours) From love to God---and maybe the two, of course, aren't at such a distance---to everything in between, Ms. Clifton captures what it is to be, to feel, to connect with others...and while some of her poetry also beautifully and mystically celebrates and mourns the experiences of African Americans, her voice is too universal, in my opinion, to categorize; there wasn't a word in this collection that failed to cross over color and burrow itself right into the heart of the whole color spectrum of human experience. If you can hear her read, don't miss it, but if you can't, her voice will sing through from the pages with clarity and grace.

It's hard to believe what Lucille Clifton can do with a handful of lines of poetry. She is our modern-day Emily Dickinson and despite all the praise that she's received over her career, it's not nearly enough. In her best work -- which is most of her work -- it's as if her intelligence cracks open a hole in the sky, a revelation that approaches religious experience. Book of Light is to my mind her very best book. It includes poem cycles based on both classical pagan mythology and judeo-christian scriptures, most notably a fabulous monologue in which Satan addresses God -- the best and most interesting use of Satan in English poetry since John Milton.

Lucille Clifton's Book of Light manages to convey some of the joy of the author. The poems are simple but their message is not. A wonderful book to serve as an introduction to one of American's premiere poets.

The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice: First Journals and Poems 1937-1952 is edited by Bill Morgan and Juanita Lieberman-Plimpton and offers a rare view of the poet during his formative years rather than the more commonly covered later life works. As such, this will serve as a fitting and important introduction for both college-level and casual Ginsberg enthusiasts, surveying the contents of candid journals allowed to see publication only after his death, and including conversations with Jack Kerouac and other notable contemporaries. In packing in elements of his personal life and family relationships, succeeds in displaying many hitherto-unrevealed aspects of Ginsberg's life and personality - essential keys for a through, in-depth understanding of his writings.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

Ginsberg was perhaps the defining person of the Beat Generation. Technically I suppose that to be a true member of the beat generation club you had to be a personal friend of Ginsberg (although he never claimed to be the leader). It's also possible that being friends of some other members of the cordon of friends around him might count as well. Or, who knows, perhaps it could be anyone who shares the philosophy.

Anyway, this book might be called the early years of a Beat Generation Poet. It consists of journal entries from his early years, along with about 100 poems, some 65 of which have never been published. The entries are varied in subject, they reflect his thinking at the time. They are also a look inside a persons head that we don't often get to see. They describe the time he spent in psychiatric hospitals, his earliest homosexual feelings, the mental illness of his mother, and the early seeking of a religious home.

This is not a biography, it is the writings of the man himself, intended for publication only after his death.

I wish I could have written like that when I was 11. I wish I could write like that now. Fascinating on many levels, from the literary to the prurient.

My copy is bound starting with the last page of the index, page five hundred and something, going backward. I tried to find some clue if that was the way it was intended, or if my copy is a rare (e-bay worthy) fluke. So far, I have found no answer within the book itself, although I am not by any means finished. Does anyone know? Is that the zen like pranksterish way its supposed to be, or did someone at DaCapo screw up?

NOTE: After much painstaking research, I have been able to discover that MY copy of the book was bound on the wrong side, and that ALL the OTHERS are bound the right way. So I'm going to shrink wrap it and sell it on e-bay in 50 years for millions of yuan.

Yosy himself is as much a poem as any poem in this book. If you do not know Yosy, you soon will. The colorful cover, with a color photo of Yosy, says this is an approachable, carefree, spirited volume. It is. Once you are inside the book you discover something else: sonic booms, the hallmarks that truthful things have been spoken:

The fool

black is my color
and none is my number
and no one sees my true face.
my silent smile
is all that remains
roaring in empty space...

BOOM!

Unfortunately I haven't the Opportunity to read the book, but knowing Yosy for many many years I am sure it is as deep and as poetic as he is.

I've had this book a day and already it is looking worn. I've read favorites to the people I most love. Bet you'll want to as well. This book whispers to your heart what it has always known, but forgot somehow. It feels wonderful to remember. Remembering these truths opens us to the sort of freedom known only to the very young, the very old, and the very wise. Don't miss it.

--and am giving it to every other boomer girl I know. I found so many poems to like and to read over and over again -- also many new poets, which is great. It's a wonderful collection. Oh yes -- I also had a dress exactly like the one on the cover --

This is a wonderful collection of moving, accessible, sometimes funny poems. Readers of both genders will find many gems here. Betsy Sholl's "Sex Ed," among many others, is worth the price of the whole book.

This book has it all! Poems about growing up, dating, getting older, becoming "adult." Great poets such as Kim Addonizio, Julia Kasdorf, Denise Duhamel, Cathy Song, Dorianne Laux, on and on. As a contributor myself, I'm proud to be a Boomer Girl--give or take a few years. Be sure to check out the fantastic last poem by Diane Seuss-Brakeman.

Antonio Machado is one of the world's greatest poets. This new addition to the slowly growing opus of Machado in English is the largest yet published, and the closest to a "Collected Poems" that we are likely to have for some time to come. (Might Mr. Barnstone be persuaded to put together a Collected Poems of Antonio Machado?) I believe there are certain felicitous pairings of poets and translators, and that the pairing of Willis Barnstone with Machado is just such a case. Mr. Barnstone's earlier volume, The Dream Below The Sun, (The Crossing Press,1981), was my first introduction to Machado's "spare, luminous, profound" poems, and so his translations have been imprinted upon my psyche as "Machado in English." I have read other translations of Machado's work, but none have yet surpassed Mr. Barnstone's.
This selection of Machado's work incorporates the 150 poems from The Dream Below The Sun, the sonnets included in Six Masters of The Spanish Sonnet, an expanded version of the evocative, highly readable and informative essay from that volume as an introduction, and about eighty-five new poems. The crowning addition here is Mr. Barnstone's inclusion of the long ballad "The Land of Alvargonzález," the longest single sustained poem that Machado wrote, presented here for the second time in English (the first translation was published in 1982 in the U.K. by Dennis Doyle). Though Mr. Barnstone rhymes in many of the translations (no mean feat, as I know from personal experience), or uses assonance to help capture the musical quality so integral to Machado's work, in this longer piece he has chosen a kind of blank ballad verse that reads with the fluency, directness and starkness of the original. Like many "folk ballads," the poem deals with greed, jealousy, murder (in this case: particide) and the supernatural force of a justice which metes out an appropriately grim punishment for the evildoers.
Mr. Barnstone has also included fuller translations of long sequences that Machado titled "Proverbs and Songs" (there are two different ones with this title: one from Fields of Castilla, 1907-1917, and another from New Songs, 1917-1930), plus numerous others featured in selected form in the earlier Crossing Press volume, and a few new ones. These sequences are full of intensely lucid perceptions, aphoristic incisiveness, paradoxical wisdom and sharp lyrical beauty. Their short, trenchant and suggestive nature brings many of them close to Japanese haikus in quality-certainly some of the closest produced by any major European poet.
I recommend this generous, beautiful volume to anyone who seeks a poetry that sings deeply and resonantly while imparting a heartfelt and soul-deep wisdom about the paradox of being alive as a human being. You will find yourself returning to these poems over and over again, as I have done.

I don't usually read poetry however I'd hear so much about Antonio Machado I thought I give it a try. It was well worth it because I love his work and I feel that I have finally found a poet I can understand and realate to. Although his writing makes me feel good inside - its not because its cheerful writing. It really makes me feel like I'm outside on a sunny, cool, autumn, afternoon pondering my life. It is simple writing in the words, yet creates a deeply introspective, sad, lonely feeling inside my heart - but in a wonderfully meaning way. Now I want to go to Spain, to the places where Antonio lived and wrote, and roam the countryside seeing the places that formed his sights to life.

What an awesomely refreshing book of poems. Exhilarating and scenic Machado's writing is easy to connect with and explore. Refreshingly alive his words illustrate thoughts like no other. What a great read! If you have ever been a fan of poetry you should really check this book out.

Walcott's poetry sweeps you along on a series of vivid and memorable images that leave you breathless.

Walcott's photograph on the back of the 1st edition sums up the feeling of Bounty- Sorrow, the grief of the death of friends and loved ones, faith in God seen "as through a glass darkly", the exhaustion of a sensitive man aware of his own mortality. Yet, through it all is the great sense of gratitude for the folk culture of the country that has nurtured him. And if he will not make great declarations of religious faith, he is thankful for the sun on the leaves, the ocean outside his door, the songs of Sessenne the folk singer of St. Lucia. Like Crusoe and Odysseus, this fortunate traveller has returned to his bench on the edge of the sea under the breadfruit leaves, "where stars and fireflies breed." This poet is past posturing. "The only art left is the preparation of grace", and even now, ever the bright eyed poet (behind the tears of the aging sage), he is "going down to the shallow edge to begin again." Walcott's only vocation has been poetry, his universe that of letters. In this he has never lost his faith.

READING THIS IS LIKE PAINTING A PORTRAIT . IT GLIMMER LIKE THE JEWEL OF THE CARRIBEANBLUE TONE IS A DEEP PATHOSOF PERSONAL EMOTION THAT COME ONLY COME FROM THE PEN OF ONE WHO LOVES HIS HOMELAMD AND WRITE ABOUT IT

Reviewed by Jennifer Imparato for Reader Views (1/06)

"The Bowery Bartenders Big Book of Poems" is the collective works, as well as a short bio of four poets, all of which are bartenders at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York. The idea of this club was that by opening a poetry bar, where the bartenders are all poets, they would get paid as performance poets and support the arts at the same time. Each of the four artists featured in this book have a unique style. I can only imagine what it must be like to be in the audience for a performance - something I would love to do someday.

Shappy is the first featured artist; you may have seen him on HBO's Def Poetry Slam. The only word I can use to describe his style is emotional. With his use of language, punctuation and emphasis, it's almost like you can hear him saying the words and like he's making you feel whichever emotion he's feeling in the poem.

Moonshine's work comes from his life experiences. In each poem, the reader gets to glimpse into parts of the author's life. The poem I like best of this particular artist's work is called "Stone's Purpose," a poem written in a way like a song, about friendship and life and choices.

Laurel Barclay's poems are interesting and a bit strange - but in a good way. Her words do one of two things, they either make you sit back and think - I mean really think, or visualize what she is writing about. One that sticks out in my mind that made me do both is "Love is the Beginning of the End," a bittersweet poem of love.

Gary Mex Glazner has the most unique style I've ever seen. His poems are written in the form of drink recipes complete with mixing instructions. At first glace, when I flipped through the book, I thought the end was all drink recipes, but as I was actually reading and got to his chapter I saw that although they are drink recipes, they are also poems. My favorite of which is "The Robert Frosty," the instructions combining the tone of Frost's poem "Fire and Ice," and ending with the final line of Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken."

Although I hardly ever read a book of poems from cover to cover, in order, I enjoyed this one. I've never seen Def Poetry Jam or any other performance poetry, nor did I know there were such things as a poetry bar, but after reading this book, I'd like to find one and see what the performance poetry scene is like. I'd recommend this book to anyone who enjoys reading unique poetry.

This is the second volume in the continuing Bowery Poetry Club series. "Bowery Bartenders" joins Taylor Mead's, "A Simple Country Girl," Taylor's quippy, fast-paced "downtown Zen." Additional volumes are planned--next, the women of the BPC.

LOVE THIS BOOK! Great Job! It's hilarious, truthful, - definately not politically correct - how refreshing!

On Sunday April 12,2002 I saw and heard Dr. Maya Angelou speak. She is an exceptionally well speaker. I loved being able to hear her read her works out loud. Her poem A Brave and Startling Truth is very well written becuase it is written about these times.

"A Brave and Startling Truth," by Maya Angelou, is a short but powerful book. The book contains the text of a poem which, according to the book cover, was read by Angelou to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations.

This is a humanistic poem in the tradition of Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda. In her straightforward poetic voice, Angelou articulates a global vision of the frailties and strengths of humanity, and expresses her hope for peace. This small book would make a good gift.

Maya Angelou's works are compelling as well as they are truthful. This book releases many untold stories of slavery in the old South, and the Africans' strife to overcome racism. I love this book and strongly recommend it.

My God, what can one say about Nanoi. Feet on the earth. eyes on the stars. The simplicity and wisdom of Lao Tzu, Chaung Tzu, Ryokwan, and the entire linage of the imps and sages come into focus for our age. This is the real deal. out of the ashes of war we have hope. as we hope for for our times, perhaps this song needs to be sung and re affirmed with lust and volume. I shall break my mirror, and I shall sing against the evil and greed of our government in these dark times.

Poems of simple truths that the soul craves, but the mind forgets.

A modern rendering of ancient wisdom gained through experience,not intellect. Touching, intelligent, empty, thorough, leaving nothing untouched butleaving no trace. One of my few personal treasures, a true touchstone. I only wish there was more of his work available.