"The physician as poet" review of: Pereira, Peter Saying the World

1.Peter Pereira is a physician who has lived in Seattle, WA. for most of his life. He did his undergraduate work in both Biology and English, before attending the University of Washington Medical School. One of a growing number of doctors who balance the craft of medicine with poetry's intuitive tropes, Pereira begins this first collection with a poem titled "Nosophilia," which means "love of affliction." Why begin here? "How else count, recount what woes?/Pimples that burn. Fevers that shiver./Shinsplint. Bowleg. Backache. Rupture./What pains us makes us us." As the brain processes everything we call us, whether consciously or unconsciously, physical and emotional pain cannot be tweezed apart. One aspect, very palpable to a doctor, is loss. Because this state of emptiness can begin even before birth, Pereira initiates the body of his book with a poem titled "Fetus Papyraceous."Sometimes one of the twins diesin utero, without his motherever knowing she'd been twice blessed.Hungry for life, the living twinWill absorb his double...The title refers to papyrus, a plant of the sedge family that ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans soaked, pressed, and dried into thin slices of the resilient material on which they preferred to write. In Egyptian hierology, language and medicine were unified in the figure of Ibis-headed Thoth, "the lord of writing," from whom we also received astronomy, mathematics, philosophy, music, and the healing arts. Pereira writes that the unborn child, whom he calls "our paper twin," "remains a faint imprint/barely visible in the translucent web/of amniotic membranes – a fetal hieroglyph." So it begins here, with loss and recovery, written on "the blank page onto which all/our imagined lives are written."In the poem, after his internship in which he saw a patient's "eyes rolling back and the sickly ashen color/of a face before death," the fledgling doctor is called to perform his "First Crash Cesarean."Hold it like a wand, you sayas I guide the bl