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Reviewed by:
  • Blood & Bone: Poems by Physicians
  • Judy Schaefer (bio)
Angela Belli and Jack Coulehan, eds. Blood & Bone: Poems by Physicians. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998. xvii + 160 pp. Paperback, $17.95.

On first reading Blood & Bone: Poems by Physicians, I was self-indulgently inclined to look for references to nurses. My second inclination was to compare and contrast the collection with Between the Heartbeats (Cortney Davis and Judy Schaefer, eds. [Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 1995]). The two books from the University of Iowa Press are complementary as companion books, but the unique voice of Blood & Bone emerged as I indulged in the luxury of reading it from front cover to back cover.

The book moves effortlessly from the job of seeing patients and doctoring, to being at home, to teaching in classroom and ward, and— finally to the finish—to linking into the larger community of the world. By book’s end the reader can share the insight, amusement, and rigor of the doctor’s life. In the many worlds that can be called the doctor’s, it is remarkably clear that a doctor knows what a doctor knows, and this specific knowledge cannot be escaped regardless of environment. There is no return to undergraduate innocence. This is the fun of reading doctors’ and nurses’ poetry—to search for and discover the metaphorical insight that a special knowledge can bring to a particular poem.

Metaphorical insight is demonstrated in so many of the poems that it is difficult to choose one as illustration, but “Tap” by Alice Jones, from the first section, titled “from patient one to next,” is a fine example of the metaphoric door. The narrator says:

I love to find a door. Like the spinal tap— above the draped fetal curve, you work the trocar inwards. Dowser, boatman, auger, bore. Every surface has its opening.

(P. 31) [End Page 244]

Poetry by doctors and nurses, and especially this poem, is about subtle openings and about finding them in order to begin the healing process and, perhaps, to initiate the invasive procedures and treatments that lead to healing. Whether physical or mental, an opening must be found. The joy of creative writing and health care is that the poem itself is an opening, and the courage to write creatively is an opening for the physician and the nurse.

Some poems in this collection are a joy to read because of their amusing insight and ironic outcome. John Wright’s “Walking the Dog,” from the “from patient one to next” section, is humbling. Haven’t we all, as advice-givers and do-gooders, gone this extra mile just to be amazed by the patient’s singular capacity for detour?

She weighed three hundred pounds. Fat and high sugars were killing her I thought.

So, I thought. So,

I gave her a puppy . . . . . . . . . . . . . She lived for twelve years hugging that little black dog while her lean husband walked it faithfully twice a day.

(P. 55)

A more intimate portrait of the physician at home is revealed in the section “a different picture of me.” The doctor is also a citizen of the world with parents, children, and friends. Sometimes the physician and those in the circle of intimacy can forget and become focused and locked on one role—usually the demanding physician role. The poetry in this section returns the reader to a welcome wholeness and balance. [End Page 245] The final lines of John Graham-Pole’s “Leaving Mother, 1954” lets the reader glimpse the childhood, the “pre-quel” of a healing physician:

then tiring stopped to rest as we rushed on, on the stolen steps of night thieves creeping away through the shades of the dying afternoon.

(P. 65)

What an exacting and descriptive phrase: “on the stolen steps of night thieves” incorporates both the vulnerability and the risk-taking required of doctors. There is the vaguest allusion to Dylan Thomas’s refrain of “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” a suggestion of the vulnerability of the doctor’s night but also the courage that propels the steps forward.

“Line Drive” by Arthur Ginsberg, from the teaching section, “in ways that...

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