A turning point comes in the fifth sestet and, to signal it, Lowell takes as his first line the famous “Una noche oscura” of St. John of the Cross, another dour poet/mystic: “One dark night”. This line begins the first of two consecutive sestets that are concerned with corporal love, bracketing a middle line that announces, to no reader’s surprise, “My mind’s not right.” The second of these sestets moves from a maudlin song refrain to a frankly depressive, almost suicidal pose: “I hear / my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, / as if my hand were at its throat. . . .” and ends with “I myself am hell; / nobody’s here –“, which is a quotation from Satan in Book IV of Paradise Lost.

Enter the titular skunks: as a parenthetical predicate to the final line of the preceding sestet (“nobody’s here –“), the poet corrects the apparently psychological meaning of “nobody’s here –” to refer to physical presence, noting that in fact there is someone here, namely a family of skunks.

The final two sestets are among the most visually powerful images in poetry with the paradoxically high drama one would not expect from skunks. The hungry skunks “march on their soles up Main Street” in search of food with fiery red eyes as the poet, in response to their upward march, stands “on top / of our back steps” and takes a deep breath of the “rich air”, watching the mother skunk jab her head into a cup of sour cream–a mother skunk who, in a fitting yet curiously ambiguous final line, “will not scare.”

This is one of my favorite poems for a number of reasons. The honesty that eventually surfaces–the poem is after all about the self-recognition of a mind that “is not right”–is stark. It confronts the reader with the admission and dares him or her to probe into the poet’s reading of the persons and events around him. The poet’s choice of skunks as an implied comparison of his affectual state, one that feels isolated, a pariah among fellow animals, is stunning. The last lines are assertive and, one hopes for the poet’s sake, encouraging, as though the narrator finds in the skunks’ indomitable nature a source of self-reliance. As opposed to the dark “red fox stain” covering Blue Hill in the third sestet, red now promises a more optimistic interpretation, describing as it does the skunks’ defiant eyes: “moonstruck eyes’ red fire”.

As gloomy as the tone is, the poet cannot refrain from puns, another trace of his reluctance to give up poetic creativity in the face of depression. Lowell describes the Ford as a Tudor (two door). The love cars “lay together, hull to hull,” enjoying the double entendre of “lay.” The skunks “march on their soles [read “souls”] up Main Street” under the Trinitarian Church.

The economy and denseness of this poem is remarkable. Within 48 lines one encounters many of the colors of the rainbow (we have white, blue, orange, red) with a clever use of red as a focal point for a possible mood shift, with the second instance subverting the meaning of the first, as mentioned above. The puns of course add semantic value. We also have references and implicit indictments of physical love and the church as organized religion (the poet’s Ford climbs “the hill’s skull,” i.e., Golgotha, when he begins his voyeuristic watch for “love-cars”; the skunks’ “white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire” contrast with “the chalk-dry and spar spire of the Trinitarian Church.”)

Much of the compressed effect derives from the force of the last lines–often spondaic–in the sestets, telegraphic lines that reinforce the gravity of the drear poetic commentary. The sequential staccato lines are: “she’s in her dotage”; “and lets them fall”; “A red fox stain covers Blue Hill”; “he’d rather marry”; “My mind’s not right”; “nobody’s here”; “of the Trinitarian Church”; “and will not scare.” The last line, “and will not scare” is reminiscent of the ending of the last line of Tennyson’s Ulysses: “[To strive to seek to find] and not to yield.” Strength and meaning are found within, in one’s self, not in the decadent civilization we see in the first four sestets.

This poem is dedicated to Lowell’s contemporary and friend, Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), who wrote “The Armadillo” (1957), inscribed to Robert Lowell. Both are poems about animals outré even in the animal kingdom, quadriped analogies to dissident and isolated poets, and both poets depict them as defiant and insouciant rebels worthy of human attention.

Read the Poem Online

Source Life Studies
Publisher Random House/Vintage
Edition 1959
Place Published New York
Miscellaneous The book in which this poem appeared won the National Book Award.
A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database. 
Web photo of Robert Lowell created from an original from Wiki Commons.

The collection opens with a poem, “Dedication” (p.1), dedicating the poems that follow to those “dear friends” who share, and so understand, the sufferings of ongoing illness. The implication is that healthy people cannot, yet, truly enter that world and, in fact, “fear” those who must live there. Yet Silver’s poems are a way into that universe. Tender and fierce, the poems in this collection seem to arise fully formed from the deepest part of Silver’s existence. The poems in section I present us with the harsh realities of illness and the anticipation of loss. In the acknowledgements, (p.72), the author notes that the poems in this section are “in honor of my sisters with inflammatory and advanced breast cancer.” In “Advent, First Frost,” she likens that “feathered prophecy” to “a bowl of frozen tears” (p.6) and in “Stage IV,” she writes that she is “taboo, now,” that she and others use words that once embarrassed them, “courage, prayer, miracle.” Even so, she is aware that “Our passports have been stamped– / our wrists and collar bones have been marked” (p.7). In a lovely prose poem on page 11, she writes in memory of her friend, Susan: “Ulysses will sail the storms till he dies. And so, my dear ones, will we” (p.11), combining, as she often does, the reality of approaching death with hope, dignity, and strength. In “Leaving the Hospital” (p.23) and “On a Line from Virginia Woolf’s Diary,” Silver celebrates the return, even if temporary, to life: “And the day takes my body back simply, / the way a mother dresses her child” (p.14). For me, the most moving poem in this section is the title poem, “I Watched You Disappear” (p. 22-23). It is a litany of regret, loss, anger, and pain, related not in poetic images but in plain and deeply human language: “I hate spring, its prettiness. / Your heart kept beating. Why didn’t it just stop?” 

Section II consists of seven, short one-stanza poems based on images from Grimms’ fairy tales. It seems that the first two lines of each poem serve as metaphorical statements about the realities of advanced breast cancer. “Owl Maiden” begins “No transformation’s instant. / Her hair fell out first, replaced by quills” (p.29). “Strawberries in Snow” begins “Belief comes easily to the ill. / Miracles fall from their lips like gems” (p.31). And “The Flowered Skull” offers these opening lines: “The magician finds them, young or old, / mothers, maidens–to him–no matter–” (p.34). The final poem in this section is a tale told to her son, Noah. In “The Hazel Tree,” Silver is the mother who “died and grew into a tree,” “each nut a word she’d grown to tell her son / now that her speaking human voice was gone” (p.35).  

In Section III, she turns, as she did in her first collection, to poems about her family. She visits again the (actual) doors of her life (“Doors” p.39), expresses regret at being impatient with her son, “Ubi Caritas Deus Ibi Est” (p.41), and in other poems examines moments of her family life, especially those shared with her son, father, sister, and husband. This section’s poems rarely mention illness, yet as they share family stories, they hint at the inevitability of loss. The final poem in this section, “Sea Glass,” ends with lines that could be applied as well to the way poems might be born from the wages of a life: “Something salvaged, sunlit, / gem-like. Something saved / from the grinding into grit” (p.55).  

Section IV, like section II, contains only seven poems, three of them commentaries on paintings and, through those commentaries, observations on illness and suffering as well. “Late Renoir” speaks of how the artist painted to “smudge away doubt” and to submerge “the mutilations of war, his dead wife, / the black he banished from his palette” (p.59). The long poem “Valentine Gode-Darel (1873-1915)” is a reflection on the five paintings by Ferdinand Hodler that captured his lover’s sickness, decline, and death (p.60). “Portraits in the Country,” (page 63), offers a glimpse into the poet’s resignation and acceptance of death, a mindset supported by her faith in both the human and the holy: “But I will not rush to put down my sash. / Instead, I will turn the leaf of my book. See with what gentle gravity God / lets it hover, in balance, then fall to its side.” The book’s last poem, “The Firebird,” suggests that words, especially poems, might hold truths that sound louder than the approach of death: “The bell ringing in your throat will drown / out the train’s slow grieving” (p.67). 

These poems are beautifully crafted, often primal, and they touch the deepest reaches of personal illness and the shadow of mortality. Readers who have breast cancer or who have family or friends living with breast cancer, might find these poems difficult to read–others under the same circumstances might find them difficult and yet, at the same time, essential. For me, dealing with the reality of an aggressive breast cancer afflicting someone I love, these poems provide a window into an experience I can only observe from a distance, even if that distance is only an embrace away. These poems provide a portal into the emotions, fears, regrets, and pleas that might be hiding behind a patient’s or a loved one’s exterior of cheerful optimism and determination. We can’t walk the path that a woman with advanced breast cancer is traveling. But these poems help us be companions on the way. 

Miscellaneous 
“Strawberries in Snow” was first published in the Bellevue Literary Review (V12N1).  

Publisher Louisiana State University Press 
Place Published Baton Rouge 
Edition 2014 
Page Count 73 

A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database .  
Web image created by Medhum.org

In her second collection, “I Watched You Disappear” Silver’s poems invited us to accompany her on her journey through treatment, anger, despair, determination, and faith. This third collection (her penultimate) continues the author’s beautifully written illness narrative, again presenting moments of joy and of despair, and always of hope. 

Silver places her title poem, “From Nothing” (pg. 1), before Section I as an epigraph to the entire collection. “Each death I witness makes me more my own,” she writes, and although the poem sees “muscle shredded” and “bone sheared,” the poem’s last lines lift, as do many of Silver’s poems, into hope and faith: “and my molecules will vault, emerging. / From darkening days, the light will surge and flee.” Section I begins with poems of memory–“Summers in Vermont” with her family (pg. 5)–and “Coincidence,” when her sister’s child is born on the same day that Silver holds her breath and presses her “shorn chest” to an X-ray machine (pg. 7). The memories here are of family moments, both the joyful and those tinged with such “darkening days.” In “Luzerne,” she recalls when time was “consigning” her to such darkness, but two things saved her: her son, the poet’s hand touching his “damp blond hair,” and poetry, “offering itself like a pair of velvet shoes” (pg.13). Silver develops the idea of poetry as a special entity, a gift that enables her to walk forward in her journey, in “Raven” (pg. 15). She imagines a raven lifting her, holding her, and then setting her down in her home, where, she says, “dawn drove a pen into my hand.” This sense of urgency and necessity pervades all of Silver’s poems, as if she has been commanded to write her story.  

Section II begins in “Anguish” (pg. 19) a stunning poem about the loss of her first child, a daughter, but the section ends in joy with “After a Favorable PET Scan” (pg. 38). It might be difficult to find another poem by any author that offers such resounding relief and happiness. This poem, especially, speaks to how terrible every test is for those who are suffering, for those whose test results might mean more medication, more surgery, or less time to live. The celebratory release felt by patients when results bring good news must be a special kind of joy: “Oh world, I will give you all my love. / I will race like a child through the fields, / I will chase off the unkindness of ravens. / My words will grow thick as marshes, / sheltering nests in salty steams.” The poems in Section II are some of the most beautiful and moving poems in this collection. See especially “Tenebrae” (pg. 21), a plea for life; “Poise” (pg. 26), a rant against giving in to cancer; “Snow White” (pg. 30), a poem of mourning for self and others; and “Four Prayers for Forgiveness” (pg. 34-35), a poem that turns illness into beauty: “–the scattered lumps in my lungs / become church domes roofed in green mosaics, / my bones’ fissures fill in with grass-green yarn. / . . . I open my eyes and all is golden.” 

Section III seems to present a corrective reaction to the joy expressed in the final poem in Section II. The poems in this last section are short, mostly one stanza, a catalog of things that are broken, cracked, ripped, or chipped. The warning that nothing lasts forever is implied in poems such as “Partings” (pg. 44) and “Woman with a Hole in Her Stocking” (pg. 45), in “Red Never Lasts” (pg. 47) and “Autumn” (pg. 57). Yet, as always in Silver’s poems, the warning is tempered by the beauty of her words and the depth of her insight into what it is to suffer over the course of an illness that has remissions and recurrences, that sees the body changed and relationships altered. In “Ideal Speech” (pg. 58), she writes “Listen to the Holy Ghost. She blows through you, / she blows her poems right through you.” Even when days seem darkest, the ideal speech for Silver is poetry, and she is the “you” through which the Holy Ghost speaks these auricles. In the book’s final poem, “Three Roses” (pg. 59), the author once again works her spell, turning illness into beauty and despair into hope. “Where only my scar line remains, a red rose blooms. / Luscious, full, so open that if it dropped a single petal, / it would not be as lovely as it is this very moment.” And in the poem’s final lines, “Lay her hands on my chest–here, I give it to you. / Feel your palm on my skin heat and spark,” What is the “it” she gives us? I believe that Silver invites us, as Whitman did, to merge with her and to live within her words, which are her flesh, the poems she writes and then gives us to read and ponder.  

Miscellaneous 

In my annotation of Silver’s second collection, “I Watched You Disappear,” I wrote that her poems might be difficult for some to read: “These poems are beautifully crafted, often primal, and they touch the deepest reaches of personal illness and the shadow of mortality. Readers who have breast cancer or who have family or friends living with breast cancer, might find these poems difficult to read–others under the same circumstances might find them difficult and yet, at the same time, essential.” The poems in this collection can be as raw as they are hauntingly beautiful. But, as do her other books, this one again opens to us a world apart, one we cannot enter unless we share this author’s diagnosis and illness trajectory. If we are caregivers or care receivers, if we suffer or we watch loved ones suffer, these poems plunge us into emotions that we ignore at our peril.  

Publisher Louisiana State University Press 
Place Published Baton Rouge 
Edition 2016 
Page Count 65 

A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database. 
Web image created by Medhum.org

Soto explores his uncertain status in relation to his family, and to the larger society in “You’ve Gone Too Far.” Detailing the “evolution” of his siblings and cousins, who “were no longer Mexican rednecks,” but “held down jobs” and “stopped jamming parking meters for free time,” Soto describes how his family nevertheless feels uncomfortable about him. “My family feared that I had evolved too far.” Drunken Christmas horseplay with his brothers reveals their distaste and distrust of his intellectualism and sophisticated clothes. “They tore my book in half, / and stripped me of my Italian belt.” Only when they have succeeded in making him sick/drunk do they accept him (at least temporarily) back into the family fold. The poem illustrates well the difficulties that can arise when one member of a family elects to live life differently from the rest yet wants to maintain a relationship with its members. The situation has resonance for the children of immigrants, for children who are more educated than their parents, or for anyone who has chosen a life unfamiliar to family or friends.  

“TV in Black and White” focuses on the role of television (in the 1950s/1960s) in shaping, reflecting, and failing to reflect American society. Soto remembers his childhood in which “[we] were sentenced to watch / the rich on TV …”. Sitcom characters played golf, ate steak, and dressed fashionably (the Donna Reed Show, Ozzie and Harriet). “While he swung / we hoed / Fields flagged with cotton . . .”  

Now life is for many relatively luxurious, “Piano lessons for this child, / Braces for that one — “ “But if the electricity / fails in this town, / a storefront might / be smashed /” “and if someone steps out / with a black-and-white TV, / it’s because we love you Donna, / we miss you Ozzie.”  

Soto’s critique is still relevant today. The ubiquity of television and streaming, even in low-income households, confers enormous power on the images and narratives presented. Now there are many more options for viewers of different cultural and economic backgrounds. Yet the dominant culture still exerts a major influence. The gap between representation and reality continues to be an important source of social dissatisfaction and unrest. 

Gary Soto 
https://garysoto.com/
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/gary-soto#tab-poems

Mexicans Begin Jogging
Online: https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/by-gary-soto/  
New and Selected Poems, Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 1995, p. 51

You’ve Gone Too Far 
Published in Junior College, Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 1997, p.24

TV in Black and White 
New and Selected Poems, Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 1995, p.50

Web image by Jr Korpa 

In “Mandatory Evacuation Zone,” Felice Aull has gathered 63 beautifully crafted poems in which she examines the intricacies of language and loss, of grief and healing.  Each of the book’s five sections considers these themes in slightly different ways, always in language that is understated, vivid, and exact.  In Section I, we read poems that focus on the author’s complicated family history and her early loss of homeland.  In “Tracings” (page 15), an unknown relative (thanks to online genealogy searches) reaches the narrator and wants to meet her.  She, however, only wishes to learn “. . . how my parents / and my infant self / made our tortuous way out . . . . ” Brought in infancy from Germany to America, the author suffers the loss of both native homeland and native language (“Notes from an Alpine Vacation” page 16).  She searches photos of her mother and ponders museum note cards illustrated by Holocaust survivors (“Museum Notecards” page 18), imagining what she can’t quite know and yet can’t quite forget.  

Section II finds the narrator as a young woman in American, awakening to sexuality (“Gay Blades,” “Camp Counselors Make Out,”  “On the Staircase” pages 29-31), becoming a wife and mother, and then a grandmother.  A grandchild’s birth is both joyful and yet another “slipping toward / the edge of separation” (“Daughter in her Eighth Month” page 37). 

In Section III, the author turns her gaze to observations of the world around her, around us, aware of how many come to loss and death.  “Be prepare to mourn,” she tells us in “Disaster in October” (page 49), and in the moving poem, “I Saw the Smoke,” re-visions September 11th in words stripped of sentimentality and therefore made more powerful. 

Sections IV and V confront bodily loss through aging and illness, noting how, in so many ways, we try both to capture and to let go: “You snap photo upon photo / hoping to grasp and preserve / what cannot be grasped” (Capturing Alaska” page 66).  We learn of the most personal losses in poems of biopsies, surgeries, and chemotherapy.  When facing the unknown, every event might seem to hold a prediction.  In “Stunning Blows,” a doorman stuns a mouse, claims that it’s dead.  But the narrator, aware of the wages of time, writes, “But I still see it, like death, / moving toward me” (page 81).  At the book’s end, we return to language, how it too can leave us (“Forget That” page 90).  Yet in the collection’s final, gentle poems, the poet is “able, finally / to walk past the park’s redbud tree / without weeping” (“Immunity” page 96).

Although there are many poems that confront loss both recalled and experienced. grief for self and others, illness and the unknown in this collection, there are also poems of great acceptance and ultimate joy: “These gifts and losses, every year, mine” (“The Key to Gramercy Park” page 98).  The poems in “Mandatory Evacuation Zone,” show us how poetry can help us to “declutter” (see “Divesture” page 99) and release, and at the same time, hold on to and embrace.

Kelsay Books, California 2017: 100 pages

Felice’s website: https://www.feliceaull.com/

Web image created by Medhum.org
A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database

In this poem of high irony, 21 stanzas of couplets brilliantly spin out stereotypes of Indigenous people promulgated by white American culture. Among the stereotypes that Alexie develops: the tragic Indian; Indian women as sexual objects for white men; Indian men secretly desirable to white women; Indians as violent, alcoholic, childlike, mystical,” and members of a “horse culture.” But in addition, Alexie emphasizes how American whites have co-opted Indian culture: “white people must carry an Indian deep inside themselves” until finally, “all of the white people will be Indians and all of the Indians will be ghosts.” The poem is a painful reminder of how the United States has at one and the same time decimated indigenous people and their culture while exploiting those people and that culture for its own gain. It is a commentary on stereotyping, loss of identity, and loss of a people.

Sherman Alexie is a poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, and film writer. He is a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indigenous person and grew up on a reservation in Washington state. His work focuses on relationships between Indigenous people and white Americans and on life within a white power structure. Alexie’s writing is consistently humorous and ironic.

How to Write the Great American Indian Novel
Sherman Alexie
https://fallsapart.com

Source The Summer of Black Widows, pp. 94-95
Publisher Hanging Loose Press
Edition 1996
Place Published Brooklyn, New York
Alternate Source Native American Songs and Poems, pp. 28-29
Alternate Publisher Dover Thrift Editions
Alternate Edition 1996
Alternate Editors Brian Swann
Place Published New York

A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database (Litmed).
Web image created by Medhum.org

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On the one hand, if the doctor is physically unable to treat, then he is not responsible for withholding treatment. On the other hand, by being rendered professionally helpless, perhaps he is being punished for not taking a moral stance against his patient. This interpretation seems to have validity because the last line recalls Psalm 137, which warns, “If I forget thee O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.” 

For drawing attention to the biblical reference, I am grateful to Dr. Danielle Ofri (clinical professor) and Lara DeLong (Class of 2001), both at NYU School of Medicine. Dannie Abse (1923-2014) was a practicing physician and poet. 

Reading by Dannie Abse

Case History
‘Most Welshmen are worthless,
an inferior breed, doctor.’
He did not know I was Welsh.
Then he praised the architects
of the German death-camps–
did not know I was a Jew.
He called liberals, ‘White blacks’,
and continued to invent curses.

When I palpated his liver
I felt the soft liver of Goering;
when I lifted my stethoscope
I heard the heartbeats of Himmler;
when I read his encephalograph
I thought, ‘Sieg heil, mein Fuhrer.’

In the clinic’s dispensary
red berry of black bryony,
cowbane, deadly nightshade, deathcap.
Yet I prescribed for him
as if he were my brother.

Later that night I must have slept
on my arm: momentarily
my right hand lost its cunning.

Commentary

“Sometimes it’s very difficult to like some patients. Patients imagine that they’re always likable, but in fact there are some one has great difficulty with, I think. And indeed there was one patient that bugged me so sufficiently that I wrote two poems about him.”

A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database.
Web image created by Medhum.org

This thought-provoking poem is best read with a representation of the painting to which it refers in view (the painting, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel, is reproduced in On Doctoring). Auden considers the nature of human suffering: “how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking / dully along . . . . ” For each individual life affected by personal catastrophe (in the painting, Icarus falling from the sky into the ocean), there is the rest of humankind which must go about its daily business, either oblivious or unable to assist (in the painting, Icarus might almost be overlooked, flailing in the lower corner of the picture while the ploughman in the foreground has his back turned). Life, and death go on although the sufferer, and sometimes those who are paying attention, find this inconceivable. And what about the ship “that must have seen / Something amazing” but “had somewhere to get to”? What is the context in which suffering is noticed, what obligations exist, what can and cannot be remedied?

Source Collected Poems
Publisher Random House
Edition 1976
Editors Edward Mendelson
Place Published New York
Alternate Source On Doctoring
Alternate Publisher Simon & Schuster
Alternate Edition 1995, 2001
Alternate Editors Richard Reynolds & John Stone
Place Published New York
First published 1938

Image of Landscape of the Fall of Icarus from wikicommons
A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database (Litmed).

The narrator in this three-stanza poem observes men in a mental hospital who suffer from what at the time (World War I) was called shell shock and now might be labeled post-traumatic stress disorder. In any case, they are insane; they relive the “batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles.”

For these tortured souls, “sunlight seems a bloodsmear” and “dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh.” They cannot escape their hideous memories of the warfare. The narrator sees them as living in hell, and he accepts for all society the blame for what has happened to them–we, he says, have “dealt them war and madness.”

Wilfred Owen is recognized as the master poet of the First World War. Writing from firsthand experiences, both in combat and in a hospital recovering from battle fatigue, Owen gave us image after image of how horrible this war was — how the idealized notions of heroism and manly valor meant next to nothing when one was trying to survive gas attacks and bombs dropped from planes. Owen was killed a week before the armistice.

In this poem he opens with a series of questions about who these mental cases are, why they rock back and forth in some kind of purgatory, why they are so tortured with panic and misery. In the second stanza, he answers the opening questions: these are the men whose minds have been ruined by their war experiences, for whom the grotesque carnage of the war was “rucked too thick for these men’s extrication.”

In the final stanza, he explains why these men are so tortured by their memories. And, typical of Owen, he points out that everyone who supported the war contributed to the madness of these mental cases.

📖 Read the poem

The Poems of Wilfred Owen
Wilfred Owen
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Edition: 1986
Editors: Jon Stallworthy
Place Published: New York

A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database (Litmed).
Web image created by Medhum.org

View poem from Poetry Foundation

This beautiful poem in The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke appears in a section called “Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical.” It is a penetrating rendering, at one and the same time, of “pure despair” and of transcendence; of the curse and simultaneous exaltation of heightened awareness; of the personal experience of “madness,” “my shadow pinned against a sweating wall,” “the edge is what I have,” and of a more profound soul-searching that contemplates union with nature and with God: “I climb out of my fear / The mind enters itself, and God the mind, / And one is One, free in the tearing wind.”

Roethke, a Pulitzer Prize winning poet, suffered from manic depressive illness. This poem is remarkable in conveying a life experienced between extremes and at the edge; we might even recognize elements here that surface from time to time in ourselves. But the poet probes beyond mere personal anguish and that is, perhaps, how he survives.

A Film about Theodore Roethke from PublicResource.Org

Remarkable People – Theodore Roethke by Seattle Colleges Cable Television

The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke
New York: Doubleday, 1966, 270 pages

An earlier version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database (Litmed).
Web image by Anchor Lee