Hatchery a pamphlet of poems by Elizabeth Osmond
Elizabeth Osmond (a neonatologist) has a unique style that makes this the best poetry book I have read for a long long time.
The book is an an incubator of emotion where the child is superimposed upon the reflection of the clinician.
The poems are a series of petit mal that alternate between Elizabeth the person and Elizabeth the clinician.
It is a rich vein of emotion derived from her care of her patients and almost seems to be a PPE against being infected with the vacancy of familiarity.
The language is as fractious as a crying baby until she picks up a pacifier and the reader is as satisfied as the writer is enthralled by it all.
I read her poems as a pastiche of recollections of her initial feelings when first walking a lace bridge over a chasm of her uncertainty that she has indeed arrived as a clinical practitioner. The caveats are well wrapped in the backward glances of her poems. All through the threads from a clinical web of care glisten; her poetry highlights a pinnacle above the foothills of a doctor’s long journey.
She even describes dragging the minutiae of the clinic around the mundane day to day world outside of the hospital.
Elizabeth has a feel for the history of her medical forebears and these are the grit in the oyster of many pearls of wisdom.
Her book is available via the link below and I can thoroughly recommend it as a balm of understanding of the human side of stressful clinical experiences.
http://vpresspoetry.blogspot.com/p/hatchery.html
