| Author | Message | ||
| ~M~
Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 30113 Registered: 11-1998 |
. Dear Membership – As you may or may not know, steve and I were fortunate enough to attend the Skagit River Poetry Festival earlier in May. Our thanks to Emusing for informing us of this event which is a biennial one held in picturesque La Conner, Washington starting back in 2000. The festival features a combination of regional and national poets who participate in public readings, workshops, and panel discussions offered over two days. Among this year’s well recognized poets were Jane Hirshfield and Thomas Lux, whom I’ve long admired. I thoroughly enjoyed having the opportunity to attend panels in which they played a major role. However, I was introduced to a new voice (new to me) at this festival whom I wanted to introduce to you. His name is Peter Pereira. Peter is a family physician in Seattle and a founding editor of Floating Bridge Press. He won a 1997 "Discovery"/The Nation Award, and recent writing honors from Artist Trust, King County Arts Commission, and Seattle Arts Commission. His chapbook, The Lost Twin, was published by Grey Spider in 2000. He won the 2002 Hayden Carruth Award for his book Saying the World, which was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2003. New poems have appeared or are forthcoming in several periodicals including Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and Journal of the American Medical Association After listening to Peter speak in a panel discussion on poetry as a healing art and having the opportunity to hear him read some of his work and to meet him, I purchased his book Saying the World, and what an excellent choice this was. This is the book that earned Peter the 2002 Hayden Carruth Award. I have been reading a few poems from it each evening over the last couple of weeks, and I understand why he was given this honor. The poems in this book are stunning -- quiet and elegant, but still raw and powerful. His use of language is masterful, yet still accessible and welcoming. Each poem invites multiple reads, and I find myself returning again and again to savor every word. I can assure you that the poems in this volume are definitely worth the cover price. And if you are a health care worker, or a patient in the healthcare system (and who isn’t at some point in their lives?), these poems will have special impact and meaning for you. Each poem rewards the reader with insight into the often precarious and always astounding nature of each human life. Saying the World by Peter Pereira is available in the WPF BookShop under “Admin’s Featured Five-Star Book Picks." Love, M (Administrator) __________________________________________________________________ Saying the World by Peter Pereira __________________________________________________________________ BOOK DESCRIPTION Excerpt from Back Cover: “Saying the World reflects Peter Pereira’s experience as a physician serving the urban poor – refugees, immigrants, and the elderly – at High Point Community Clinic in Seattle. The poems explore his complex background, including a sister’s death, family relationships, and life as a childless gay man. In honoring Peter Pereira with the Hayden Carruth Award, judges Gregory Orr and Sam Hamill wrote: “Pereira has a magic touch like that of William Carlos Williams: the ability to be a doctor and a poet simultaneously, and to make it all so simply, deeply, and translucently human that the poems seem absolutely inevitable.” EDITORIAL REVIEWS Booklist: “Peter Pereira is at the forefront of a national movement of medical practitioners who utilize literature as a part of their training. Saying the World arises from his practice as a family physician serving the urban poor, as well as his experience of his sister’s death, his family relationships, and life as a childless gay man. Pereira believes doctors in training should learn to appreciate and write poetry. His poems argue that those who do sharpen their attentiveness to patients and help themselves as well as any readers to better realize and be humbled by the persistence of suffering and its endurance and the responsibility for healing that the well bear toward the suffering. "What Is Lost," already used in many teaching situations, reports a clinical scene--the doctor conversing, via an interpreter, with a Khmer refugee about how to relieve her troubled sleep--with marvelous economy and, thanks to giddying focal shifts from scarred survivor to an entire brutalized nation, maximal power. That poem is one, not necessarily the best, in the book's first section, consisting of what might be called clinical poems. The second section's poems of identity and family, and the third's, concerned with Pereira's ordinary life as a gay man, reveal particulars that motivate this doctor's compassion and others that threaten to dilute it.” TABLE OF CONTENTS I. Nosophilia Fetus Papyraceous Intern First Crash Cesarean Baby Made of Flowers Hydrocephalic Her Name is Rose Murmur The Wages of Mercy Labyrinthitis Litany What is Lost A Hole in the Web What Matters Breath Dans le Palais Nostalgique Take Care II. Chambered Nautilus Echolalia The Boy Who Played with Dolls Kafka’s Grave Black Narcissus Suite for a Sister Vincent Hiking to Tsagaglalal Petroglyph, Thinking of Guy Anderson at 90 Winterbloom Melancholia III. Window Seat Learning to Two-Step The Birth of Flowers Senseless Beauty Shadow and Spirit Loft Bedroom, Tranquility Cottage, Orcas Island In August, My Sister Waiting for Sophocles Pas de Deux Lost Winter Stripping The Winepress Double Magnolia April Elms Peaches A Pot of Red Lentils Giving Way Coming Home Late The Late Rose Putting the Garden to Rest Saying the World SAMPLE POEMS: (A few more poems are also available for viewing in the Amazon listing where you can peek inside the book.) Murmur They cut open his chest and split the ribs, stitched bits of leg veins to the outside of his heart, patched it all together and stapled him shut, sent him home. Now he feels a turbulence like a bird fluttering inside him. As if his heart’s old house has a bad door that won’t close, shudders in the wind. I place the cold, hard coin of my stethoscope on his bare chest, touching down on each of the four places, medical school’s rote lessons a thing of habit as I listen for the Tennessee . . . Tennessee . . . of a stiffened ventricle, the Kentucky . . . Kentucky . . . of congestive failure. Systole, diastole . . . lub- dub . . . lub-dub . . . I count ten healthy beats, watch him breathe. Perhaps it was the two hours on bypass, the six weeks he missed work for the first time in his life, or how like an infant he needed others to help him rise from a chair, take his first steps around the unit. I fold away my stethoscope. He traces the pink zipper of a scar down the front of his chest, tells me he’s been married to the same woman almost fifty years, has a son who sells life insurance, a daughter in Topeka, three grandkids. And now I hear it, too. How his heart that once said . . . today . . . today . . . now seems to say remember me . . . remember me. Black Narcissus Her arms swimming in the languid June heat, I’m watching my mother deadhead spent daffodils – thinking of the summer my sister disappeared off the deep end of the motel pool in Coeur d’Alene. How a faded tuft of her auburn locks was all we saw, swirling the surface as chlorine waves lapped drain screens. One white hand emerged, opened like a lily, then vanished, before my mother lunged for the seaweed tangle of hair, lifted her child’s gasping body straight up out of the water to the lull of a cement ledge – one quick flawless movement – as if she were weightless. She didn’t know then, that it would be her younger daughter, the one with black hair and eyes, asleep poolside in the bassinet, who three years later would die, blood and urine laced with a terrible sweetness, her drowned breath an acetone mist. Perhaps that’s why, each summer, my mother pulls up her bulbs, exhumes them one by one – daffodil, tulip, dahlia, hyacinth – before creeping autumn rains begin, before any of them can be lost. . | ||
| Fred Longworth
Senior Member Username: sandiegopoet Post Number: 4010 Registered: 05-2006 |
I think of William Carlos Williams, physician by day, genius poet by night . . . * * * * * These poems are touching and very human. Fred Unofficial Forum Pariah -- recent victim of alien abduction -- I'm running out of places to store the bodies. |
