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Book Reviews 203 and pity, irony and pity," characterizes the conflict of his own tragic and darkly comic reflections upon his condition. T. S. Eliot once observed that when a poet writes about belief, it is his or her task not to convince or to describe, but to allow the reader to feel what it feels like to believe. Several of the stories in this collection meet that criterion of poetry. They surprise us into unexpeded emotions; they lure us into empathy—with the patient in the isolation of his misapprehended needs, with the lovers and caretakers in their efforts to strike some tactful balance between loyalty and self-protection, and with the wide web of the marginally involved, family and friends, whose grief is almost overwhelmed by bewilderment. These Stories from a Crisis speak from the center of the storm with an odd calm that seems an admonition to the rest of us to look hard and accurately at what is happening to people around us—even to brush away the misty veil of pity and conventional propriety to do so. Some of the stories touch more deeply than others; only one or two deserve a place among the best short fiction of the year. But this is a collection that deserves to be read, and one that will leave no reader untouched or unawakened . An American edition is due out from New American Library (a Plume Book) in 1988 but was not yet available at the time this review was written. —Marilyn R. Chandler Mills College Jon Mukand, ed., Sutured Words: Contemporary Poetry about Medicine. Brookline , Mass.: Aviva Press, 1987. xviii + 402 pp. $18.00. Because of their brevity, "ponderability," and synthetic wisdom, poems are an extraordinary medium through which to explore the great topics, such as love, beauty, and nature. One of the greatest topics of human experience is the realm of the body's health and sickness, and poets often write about illness and healing, or even death, on occasions when they, or their loved ones, experience such events. Such writing, however, is rarely continuous over a whole book, in the way a volume of love poems traditionally is. Thus, the poetic literature on medical matters is an archipelago of work, a discontinuous scattering that awaits an imaginative, hardworking editor. In the case of recent American poetry, we are fortunate to have the work of Jon Mukand, who has put together a valuable collection. Mukand, 204 BOOK REVIEWS a physidan and poet, has been at work on this project for some years; fortunately, his vision and tenadty have found encouragement along the way. This volume contains 249 poems by 181 American poets from the last twenty-five years (with a few exceptions). Almost all of the poems are reprinted from books or journals, such as The New Yorker and Poetry; the authors indude some of our leading poets: John Berryman, James Didcey, Ridiard Eberhart, David Ignatow, Denise Levertov, W. S. Merwin, Howard Nemerov, Sylvia Plath, and Adrienne Ridi, to name a few. There are also names that are new to me, Ted Kooser, Ronald Wallace, and Sandra McPherson , who have also provided fine work, plus a few "discoveries," virtually unknown poets whose work Mukand has induded. The individual poems are all at least good, and the majority are of high quality, to use inadequate terms. More important, the poems collectively assume an epic quality, as we encounter sickness, death, grief, birth; elegy, satire, description ; experiences of patient, family, physidan; joy, fear, and wonder. To read straight through the book is to feel various, vivid, and important realities. Since these writers are sensitive to nuances of events, language, and the dilemmas of human mortality, there is also a surprising intimacy, unusual for an anthology, which more typically has the feel of a phone book. What are the sources of this paradoxical set of qualities, the epic and the intimate? First, I think, would be the obvious point that the writers share their intense feelings about the events being described. I reopen the book at random and find Sandra Gilbert's poem "The Night Grandma Died" faced by David Bottoms's poem "The Orchid" about another grandmother dying...

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