Rattle – Winter 2007

This edition of Rattle includes a tribute to nurses that makes this issue worthwhile on its own. The nursing section has personal essays from poet-nurses, such as Courtney Davis, T.S. Davis, Anne Webster and Christine Wideman, describing how they became both writers and nurses, which role was dominate at what point in their lives, and how nursing feeds into their writing. They talk of the sensuousness of nursing, the essential selflessness and empathy nurses experience, and how that “otherness” affects their poetry. Courtney Davis wrote movingly about her favorite patient: “A few weeks after my patient died, not knowing what else to do, I dug out my old poetry notebook…” “Writing about her death, I felt a sudden, inexplicable joy…” “I had also, in the writing, let her go.”

This edition of Rattle includes a tribute to nurses that makes this issue worthwhile on its own. The nursing section has personal essays from poet-nurses, such as Courtney Davis, T.S. Davis, Anne Webster and Christine Wideman, describing how they became both writers and nurses, which role was dominate at what point in their lives, and how nursing feeds into their writing. They talk of the sensuousness of nursing, the essential selflessness and empathy nurses experience, and how that “otherness” affects their poetry. Courtney Davis wrote movingly about her favorite patient: “A few weeks after my patient died, not knowing what else to do, I dug out my old poetry notebook…” “Writing about her death, I felt a sudden, inexplicable joy…” “I had also, in the writing, let her go.”

In a touching poem subtitled “for Dan,” Geri Rosenzweig writes, “When at last / you find the street of the cellist, / may the dread / that accompanied you / fall by the way.” Only nurses close to life and death can write about it as in these selections, close to the pulse, with grace, and strength.

The first one hundred-odd pages include choice poetry, some of it dead-on hilarious, like Nathaniel Whittemore’s honorable mention-winning “You Never Know When You’re Gonna Live…” It begins, “Sarah was a chronic masturbater;” and becomes more inventive – and 99.9 percent G-rated – from there.

So many poems left me satisfied, feeling like these editors really know how to choose. Tom Holmes wrote with clever irony, “My Mouth (An Apology)”: “I left my mouth / hanging on the wall / With the front door / shut and locked.” “ Persephene Remembers: The Bed” by Alison Townsend will haunt you, and “Still Life” by Jessica Daigle Vidrine has universal implications for anyone who has left someone behind; there are too many other striking poets to mention. If a poetry lover doesn’t find this journal measuring up, nothing will.
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