KARL KIRCHWEY is an award-winning American poet, book reviewer, creative writing teacher, translator, arts administrator, and literary curator. He has been a director of the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, directed the creative writing program at Bryn Mawr College, served as Andrew Heiskell Arts Director at the American Academy in Rome, and is currently a professor and director of the MFA program in creative writing at Boston University.

Foreword

QUINTUS SERENUS SAMMONICUS Abracadabra
 
THE ILLNESS
C. K. WILLIAMS Really
EMILY DICKINSON The Soul has Bandaged moments
MARK STRAND The sickness of angels is nothing new
ANNE FINCH The Spleen
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE Spleen (IV)
WILLIAM COWPER Lines Written During a Period of Insanity
SPENCER REECE From Hartford
CAROL ANN DUFFY The Virgin s Memo
DOUGLAS DUNN From Disenchantments
D. A. POWELL they hear the clapping of the bell and are afraid
GJERTRUD SCHNACKENBERG From The Light Gray Soil
KAY RYAN Among English Verbs
ROBERT PINSKY Dying
EAVAN BOLAND Anorexic
GWYNETH LEWIS Talk With a Headache
SAPPHO TWO TRANSLATIONS (Fragment 31)
THOM GUNN The Man With Night Sweats
C. P. CAVAFY The Funeral of Sarpedon
KEITH DOUGLAS John Anderson
DAVID CONSTANTINE Pity
MAY SWENSON Staring at the Sea on the Day of the Death of Another
 
THE DIAGNOSIS
WIS AWA SZYMBORSKA Clothes
W. H. AUDEN Miss Gee
WILLIAM LOGAN Little Compton
ALISSA VALLES Decision Tree
RAFAEL CAMPO Antidote
GAVIN EWART Sonnet: Intermittent Claudication
JANE KENYON Prognosis
LUCILLE CLIFTON Cancer
LUCILLE CLIFTON 1994
C. K. WILLIAMS Diagnosis
NICOLE SEALEY medical history
J. D. MCCLATCHY My Mammogram
ADRIENNE RICH Power
TOM PAULIN Under the Eyes
JULIA ALVAREZ Are we all ill with acute loneliness
EMILY DICKINSON A Wounded Deer leaps highest
 
THE REMEDY
ROBERT PINSKY ABC
VASKO POPA Before the Game
VASKO POPA After the Game
MASAOKA SHIKI Eight Haiku
ZBIGNIEW HERBERT Breviary
MARCELLUS EMPIRICUS From De Medicamentis
JANE KENYON From Having It Out With Melancholy
C. P. CAVAFY Melancholy of Jason Kleander, Poet in Kommagini, AD 595
NATALIA TOLEDO The Flower That Drops Its Petals
MIROSLAV HOLUB Although a poem arises . . .
MIROSLAV HOLUB Although a poem is . . .
ADRIENNE RICH Calibrations
GREG DELANTY The Green Room
MARK STRAND When after a long silence one picks up the pen
LOUISE GLUCK A Slip of Paper
C. P. CAVAFY Kleitos Illness
JOHN DONNE Hymne to God My God, In My Sicknesse
D. H. LAWRENCE From The Ship of Death
ADA LIMON The Raincoat
MARY JO SALTER Hot Water Bottle
LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU A Receipt to Cure the Vapors
KARL KIRCHWEY Blood and Light
ALISSA VALLES Pain Fellow
RAFAEL CAMPO From Phone Messages on Call
KATE DANIELS Support Group
AIMEE GRUNBERGER Chemotherapy
J. D. MCCLATCHY From Radiation Days
MAX RITVO Poem To My Litter
JOHN DOWLAND Come, Heavy Sleep
DONALD HALL Deathwork
OMAR KHAYYAM From The Ruba iyat
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE Invitation to the Voyage
MARGARET ATWOOD Up
STEVIE SMITH Away, Melancholy
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS My own heart let me more have pity on
 
THE HEALING
LUCILLE CLIFTON blessing the boats
ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI Try to Praise the Mutilated World
WIS AWA SZYMBORSKA The End and the Beginning
RUDAKI On the Death of the Amir s Father
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Song: Fear no more the heat o the sun
DYLAN THOMAS A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London
EAVAN BOLAND Quarantine
ADRIENNE RICH From a Survivor
ROSANNA WARREN For Chiara
DEBORA GREGER Black Silk
SEAMUS HEANEY Miracle
CHARLOTTE MEW On the Asylum Road
LOUISE BOGAN Evening in the Sanitarium
SYLVIA PLATH Tulips
ROBERT LOWELL Home After Three Months Away
EMILY DICKINSON

A remarkable Pocket Poets anthology of poems from around the world and across the centuries about illness and healing, both physical and spiritual.

From ancient Greece and Rome up to the present moment, poets have responded with sensitivity and insight to the troubles of the human body and mind. Poems of Healing gathers a treasury of such poems, tracing the many possible journeys of physical and spiritual illness, injury, and recovery, from John Donne s Hymne to God My God, In My Sicknesse and Emily Dickinson s The Soul has Bandaged moments to Eavan Boland s Anorexic, from W.H. Auden s Miss Gee to Lucille Clifton s Cancer, and from D.H. Lawrence s The Ship of Death to Rafael Campo s Antidote and Seamus Heaney s Miracle. Here are poems from around the world, by Sappho, Milton, Baudelaire, Longfellow, Cavafy, and Omar Khayyam; by Stevens, Lowell, and Plath; by Zbigniew Herbert, Louise Bogan, Yehuda Amichai, Mark Strand, and Natalia Toledo. Messages of hope in the midst of pain in such moving poems as Adam Zagajewski s Try to Praise the Mutilated World, George Herbert s The Flower, Wis awa Szymborska s The End and the Beginning, Gwendolyn Brooks when you have forgotten Sunday: the love story and Stevie Smith s Away, Melancholy make this the perfect gift to accompany anyone on a journey of healing.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.