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THE
POETRY OF NURSING
Ed. Judy
Schaeffer, The Kent State University Press, 2006
Review by Natalie Safir
The common
thread that connects the varied, carefully crafted poems in this anthology
of poems and commentaries by nurses, is the authors’ way of being in the
world. As caring, active witnesses of the human condition, they have been
trained to be acute observers of detail and nuance who must remain alert,
efficient, and present to all possibilities of illness and health. The poems
have been inspired by tangible moments of experience, witnessed, integrated
and recorded. It is in these processes that the healing nature of saving,
reclaiming, and transforming can take place.
Cortney Davis
(p.22) tells us that she learned early that “writing holds on to things, and
it also lets them go. It allows you to change the outcome of events. It
gives you wings and, at the same time, binds you to reality. Writing
encourages you to pay attention with all your senses… when you write, you
stumble upon metaphors that allow you to describe even the most abstract
emotions in concrete words.“ (p 22) When she writes, she adds, poetry and
nursing merge - “the poem becomes the place in which the act of caring
becomes a way of keeping, and the mysteries of our world are revealed in the
sensual reality of physical detail.” (p23)
This is
wonderfully expressed in a poem titled “The Nurse’s Pockets.” (p 25) A
nurse, reentering the room of a patient who has just died
…“finds
nothing/but the bed with its depression,/its map of sheets she strips./ In
the drawer, gumdrops. A comb/woven with light hair, and a book/with certain
pages marked./ She takes all these into her pockets./She has trunks in every
room of her home./full of such ordinary things.”
In “The Good
Nurse,” p. 29. she speaks of the emotional compensations nursing can
provide:
“the kiss has
everything to do/with sons who look at us/and disappear, daughters/who line
their eyes with blue/and borrow our too-loud laughter./We want to bind
them/in our arms. Instead, we tend/the patient who longs for us”
The poems in
this anthology exhibit a consistent courage - the power, perhaps the
training, to look “with bare eyes.” (Davis, p. 26) Nurses have to see what
is happening on a literal and a metaphoric level. However difficult to see
and process, nurses have to be there at the front of human illness and
vulnerability, must do what needs to be done, and be able to function in the
face of extreme pressure and difficulty. And as Leanne Mercer expresses this
(p 99) “to keep open the possibility of seeing with the heart what is
invisible to the eye” as has been well stated in The Little Prince.
The courage
to see in these poems - is described in fitting metaphor in
Jeanne Brynner’s essay (p 18): “those who are called to speak must lift
bandages to describe the wound’s terrible beauty.” Writing poems enables
her to “speak in a bold voice” she cannot wrestle forth in any other way. (p
8). She reminds us that “much of nursing is observation and
documentation” and that her work as a poet enables her to document
the journeys of others.
The dual
natures of nurses--methodical, accurate, disciplined, knowledgeable, must
coexist with their capacities for compassion, intuition, creativity, and
caring. In addition, the imagination to transcend borders allows these
poems to come into being. It seems fitting that the poems offered are
accompanied by commentary and explication by the authors which reveal the
degree of awareness and intention in the work.
The poets
employ vivid, dramatic body imagery in their pieces. “Being around bodies in
pain and in various stages of healing, I recognize how hard the body works
to repair itself and stay well.“ (p 14) Jeanne Bryner comments. “In Praise
of Hands” p14, she writes:
“That they
are slaves./That each tendon’s a rope/and the knuckles are pulleys./ That
their white bones/line up like pieces of broken chalk.”
From her
unique vantage point, Sandra Bishop Ebner in “Size and Surgical Gloves”
(p 58) chills us with:
“Listen to
the scream/of saw/ as it splits sternum”
In the
unflinching, awful details of “Dehiscence,” (p 71) Amy Haddad writes:
“You have
come unstitched/Holes appear in your threadbare abdomen“ and later in the
same poem:
“Since I am
helpless in the face of your tragedy,/I give you the certainty and calmness
of my motion,/the competence and comfort of my touch”
In “Chemotherapy Lounge”
(p 76) Haddad gives a tough assessment of conditions to which patients are
subject in pursuit of a cancer cure.
“The faintly
metallic odor of noxious drugs,/the sour-sweet overlay of
vomit/permeates everything, even the carpet./Trapped in our seats,/plugged
to poles,/we sit for hours./Poisoning takes time.”
Recording
what he has seen and experienced, Theodore Deppe in “Admission Children’s
Unit,” (p 43) takes a deeply upsetting look at a mother’s behavior.
“Her red
hair/was pulled back in a braid, she tugged at its flames/and what she’d
done, it turns out, was hold her son/so her boyfriend could burn him with
cigarettes.“
In a poem
called “Sunrise” (p 103) Leanne Mercer, writing about her mother’s death,
and in an effort to gain greater understanding, sets the poem in a place of
nurturance:
“Cottonwood
and Russian olive trees/exhale silent green light./the sun begins its slow
smile/down red canyon walls./Broken trees raise arthritic/limbs in
supplication.”
Mercer tells us “I have
learned to listen to incoming messages and to act upon what I believe to be
true.“ (P 105)
Addressing a friend at
home dying of cancer, Geri Rosenzweig in “Prism” (p 128) expresses her
tenderness with a quiet prayer:
“let the
visitor, hurrying/ up the path, lift the latch/to find your hair grown
back,/the wool cap you wore/flung useless in a closet”
Rosenzweig confronts her
own mortality in “This Bach Cantata” (p 125) as she muses:
“before the
children’s/voices grow rough/on the phone./O before I forget their
names/let me remember/where the pills are/the silk robe/the carafe of
wine/Lead me to this Bach cantata/I put by with clear instructions.”
In her
commentary, Rosenzweig offers another parallel between the nurse’s and the
poet’s mission: “ as nurses tend to people, writers are tending to the poem
- listening for what it needs, knowing when to nourish, add and when to
leave it alone“…(p 130)
The nurse
poets, close as they are to the anomalies of life and death are always on
some level dealing with the wonder and mystery of life. In “Higher
Learning,” (p 179 ) Constance Studer writes candidly:
“And I have
no answers/only two hands; rubbing lotion into my sister’s skin”
The poems are
engaged, serious, sometimes ironic, irreverent, but always claim the power
of true emotion. We can recognize a poem’s tenderness, harshness or
acceptance to the world around it in the subtleties of voice and form.
Poetry “thinks’ by sound and image. It can approximate the actual flavor of
life in which objective and subjective become one, in which the conceptual
mind and the feeling/experiential senses combine.
In poetry, through an intense
compression of meaning
--
mind, emotion, body and perception are entwined, each circling into the
realm of the others. Such interweaving forges an imaginative understanding
in which language is not so much an object of attention as an act of
attention played out before us and within us. These poems, in their
strength, variety, careful attention to craft and thoughtfulness engage us,
deepen intensity, and enhance the life experience of the reader.
NATALIE SAFIR
has been publishing poems in literary journals such as
Slant, Rhino, Madison Review, Mid-America Review, Pivot, the
MacGuffin, etc. since the 1980s and
anthologized in college texts: Reading Poetry,
Random House Educational Division, Literature, and The McGraw Hill
Book of Poetry, and Responding to
Literature, 3rd 4th and 5th editions, through
2005. Her books published are Moving into Seasons, 1981, To Face
the Inscription, 1987, and Made Visible in 1998. Poet and
then Chairman of the Writing Program at Sarah
Lawrence, Thomas Lux, wrote: "I admire very much
these utterly lucid, distilled, and powerful poems." Her fourth
collection, A Clear Burning, was published in 2004. Poet
Michael Waters called this "a book of deep and
wild sustenance." She had edited poetry
for "Gravida" and "Inprint" and taught poetry writing workshops for
many years.
Click
here to read poems from The
Poetry of Nursing.
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