Leopold's Maneuvers

Cortney Davis

Description

In the venerable tradition of caregivers writing about the healing arts—a tradition peopled by the likes of Anton Chekhov, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Walker Percy, and Denise Levertov—Cortney Davis brings to poetry the experience, insight, and compassion of a nurse practitioner who daily confronts the unexpected frailties, passions, and power of the flesh.

Taking the body as her text, Davis crafts her poetry from the pains of labor and the joys of birth, the depredations of disease and the sustaining hope of recovery. She trains her clear, unflinching gaze on the unfolding scene—a woman shipwrecked with a stranger; an adult reinventing childhood; an ill woman rediscovering pleasure in her body; a nurse realizing, in one harrowing instant, that she is as vulnerable as her patients—unerringly finding the particular image, the human detail, that connects reader, writer, and subject with the world. Primal, compelling, intelligent, these poems show us how to see as clearly as the poet does, with empathy and grace.

Sujets

• Poetry

Informations

• Publié par: UNP - Nebraska
• Date de parution: 01 octobre 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780803204461
• Langue: English

Extrait

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Prairie SchoonerBook Prize in Poetry

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editor:Hilda Raz

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Leopold’s Maneuvers

cortney davis

University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London

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©2004by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data. Davis, Cortney,1945– Leopold’s maneuvers / Cortney Davis. p. cm. – (Prairie schooner book prize in poetry) isbn 0-8032-1729-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn 0-8032-6643-x (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Nurses—Poetry. 2. Nursing—Poetry. 3. Body, Human—Poetry. I. Title. II. Series. ps3554.a93342l46 2004 811'.54—dc22 2004002327 Font: Tribute, by Frank Heine for Emigre. Designed and typeset by Dika Eckersley. Printed by Edwards Brothers, Inc.

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For Jon, with love

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And your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body. Walt Whitman

—in other words, every woman is a nurse. Florence Nightingale

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