Health Humanities and Nature based therapies: Physician-poets

In Comfort Measures Only, Rafael Campo bears witness to the unspeakable beauty bound up with human suffering. Gathered from his over twenty-year career as a poet-physician, these eighty-nine poems--thirty-one of which have never been previously published in a collection--pull back the curtain in the ER, laying bare our pain and joining us all in spellbinding moments of pathos. The poet, who is also truly a healer, revives language itself--its sounds channeled through our hearts and lungs, its rhythms amplified through the stethoscope--to make meaning of our bewilderment when our bodies so eloquently and yet wordlessly fail us. Campo's transcendent poems, in all their modernity amidst the bleep of heart monitors and the wail of ambulance sirens, remind us of what the ancients understood: that poetry sustains us, and whether we live or die, through what we can imagine and create in our shared voices we may yet achieve immortality.

The Halo is quasi-autobiography about a man who has wings and wants desperately to simply be human. Tracking from adolescence through adulthood, it explores an accident that temporarily paralyzes him and exposes him to human weakness all the way to his transformation into something more powerful than even he realizes. It explores a personal evolution from being prey to becoming the hunter. Praise for C. Dale Young "Young's poems are so fierce and serrated." --Jeff Gordinier, New York Times Book Review "Young is a doctor as well as a poet, and [his work] demonstrates a skilled physician's combination of empathy and formal precision." --David Orr, NPR "Sometimes the ability to convey information compactly and quickly has moral grace. [Young's] writing can put garrulous narration or evasive speechifying to shame." --Robert Pinsky, The Washington Post "[W]e cannot rely on art to tell us the whole truth or even depend upon those who are supposed to protect us. And yet, [C. Dale Young] is compelled to make visible the darkness around us. Whether or not that itself is an act of tenderness, Young refuses to say for certain. And that is what makes his poetry a crucible where readers must confront their own beliefs--about poetry, society, and themselves." --Christopher Hennessy, Ploughshares

Audrey Shafer observes the world with a quiet intensity, with a reverence for the everydayness of her children's toys, the earth outside her window, and the sacred trust of her sleeping patients. Her poems reflect the seamless back and forth of her woman's life, at one moment breathing for her patients, in the next choosing socks for her daughter to wear. "Barking orders / I stick the tube in / silently curse, pray, sell my soul for the beat of a hidden heart," this doctor/mother reminds us all of the fluidity of identity. Stunning, truly. -Delese Wear, Ph.D., Editor, Journal of Medical Humanities Audrey Shafer's poems demonstrate a unique blend of tenderness and steadiness that makes hers a recognizable and welcome voice among contemporary physician-poets. Her images are powerful and compelling. Consider, for example, "gardenias thick as lust" and the "gauze-choked winter sun." Her line is graceful, yet disciplined; her language imaginative, even transcendent, yet always grounded in "flesh, arm, artery, earlobe" and always aware of "the scrape of the key in the lock." Sleep Talker reveals that the most ordinary moment in life can also be "the glory and the answer." -Jack Coulehan, M.D., Editor, Blood and Bone: Poems by Physicians Audrey Shafer has, in abundant measure, all the requirements for the making of fine poems-a well-tuned eye, ear, and heart. A palpable sense of discovery is everywhere in her poetry, unique, contemplative, joyful, and wise. -John Stone, M.D., poet and essayist, Where Water Begins: New Poems and Prose In her first book of poems, anesthesiologist Audrey Shafer, M.D., boldly weaves her professional and personal worlds. These poems, some previously published in journals and anthologies, provide a glimpse of the daily life, including the worries, foibles and glories, of a working mother. The book, although divided into three sections, contains many poems that interconnect the three themes (home, work, and journeys) as a reflection of the impossibility of disconnecting facets of a lived life. The first section, "that I call home", invokes the poet's childhood in Philadelphia, the death of her father, love and succor from family and friends, and the fierce and tender joys of motherhood. The love poem, "Home", written for her husband, is characteristic Shafer: the influence of medical and anatomical knowledge on her experience of the fragilities of love and life. Many poems, however, are far from solemn: "Socks" intertwines humor and maternal love and "Riff" is a self-deprecating romp into drumming taken up in midlife. The second section, "not quite sleep", delves into the world of the doctor, and in particular, the anesthesiologist. This section may be of greatest interest to those in the fields of medical humanities and pedagogy. In poems such as "Center Stage" and "Anesthesia", the poet reflects on the nature of anesthesia and the profound gift of trust that her patients offer her. The widely anthologized poem, "Monday Morning", describes the intimate early morning hours of a doctor / mother.