Alternative Medicine

I enjoyed Dr. Campos poetry because as a nurse I could identify with some of his feelings. He is frank, truthful and writes with an impact not seen often. I highly recommend this book!

I chose the book because I have decided to read more poetry. Dr. Campo is a physician, as I am. Many of his poems strike a familia chord with me. Great work!

I heard Rafael Campo read his poetry many years ago, before I was ill myself, and was quite fascinated by the way he used his knowledge as a doctor to bring the body into poetry. Alternative Medicine comes after The Enemy, which I haven't read, and the themes that he works with seem to have remained the same: his Cuban roots, his experience (or his patients' experience) with healing, and love. The book was divided into parts according to those subjects and my favorite section by far was his poetry that derives from his profession as a doctor. The first section about his family background did nothing for me. There were a couple of love poems I particularly enjoyed and one, "Views of Heaven," that struck me as lovely in its portrayal of the mundane pleasures and annoyances of a long term relationship. It's appropriately delivered in couplets. ... I don't quite understand the reasons you'll cook your pancakes without a recipe, or keep the thermostat at sixty-three all winter long, or say you love me when you're tardy meeting me someplace, again. I say I love you too, though I prefer a simple omelet to pancakes, and turn the thermostat back up to seventy. ... These homely, recognizable details of how a couple's bond survives such differences and irritations builds to gratitude that they have both survived against the odds. storms come, and bring their opportunity to do another chore together, see the world for what it really is. I look at you, and think that even as you rake these broken twigs and shattered leaves, I'm yours, and you're the heaven I'm still rising toward. I marked several poems within the section that shares the title of the book. Many of these poems expose pain and his own efforts to respond to pain and death. Here is the second half of "On the Wards": I watched a patient of mine say goodbye to life. She was alone, like you, alone like me, she was in agony. She looked at me, and I, afraid to be the last thing here on earth she saw, twisted my head to look away. I almost do the same to you, afraid you might imagine me as later you lie dying, but I don't. Instead, I look at you remorselessly, the way I hope that someday I am seen, the way that each one deserves to be imagined, if not restored to health, then spared this grief. But the stories of the body are not all devoid of lightness as in the delight of "Nude": I enter unexpectedly, and see your hair cascading white-and-gray in loose, long tresses down the full length of your back. The nurse is bathing you in honeyed light, when sunrise in the hospital makes all seem gorgeous, even the gleaming bedpan, eve the scuffed linoleum, even the faces peering into death. Your heart is failing, yet you have the strength to turn, your breasts still the world's nourishment, your eyes, though I have diagnosed in them thick cataracts, alight again with youth's demure, coquettish indignation. "Please, excuse me Doctor, I am indisposed!" For just a moment, as you pull the sheet to safeguard your imperiled modesty-- your operatic thighs, your blatant hips, your ruined neck with its distended veins-- I think you are like Goya's ageless nude, eternal beckoning of human form, inviolable, innocent, a gift, that both of us acknowledge, knowing that such live is too sweet ever to be shared. "Pharmacopeia for the New Millennium" is a five part poem that is cultural commentary described as drug descriptions. Here is a sampling: 2. Heronil Highly effective for the absence of inspiring leaders. May also be prescribed for the treatment of illegitimate elections, lack or loss of civil rights, and disgust with supreme judicial courts. ... 3. Wikipor Used to control delusions of control, democratic knowledge-sharing, and all other false hopes engendered by too much surfing on the internet. May cause hives if taken while downloading music files illegally or checking out porn sites. ... I'm not sure that Campo will ever create a deeply memorable pantoum or villanelle but it's not going to keep him from trying. Certainly he has subject matter that may pay off in something great. In this volume, I would say his attempts at poems with repeating lines is interesting but not extraordinary. Given that this is a book with a strong section on medical practice, his love of repeating forms made me think of these forms as rib-like. I've found myself curious about his earlier books Landscape with Human Figure and What the Body Told (which is probably the one I heard him read from). While I wait to get around to them on my wishlist, I'll pass this book along to my sister who is a massage therapist and who describes herself as an anatomy nerd. This book would be a great gift for anyone in a medical profession who also enjoys poetry--as well as for anyone with a problematic body that results in a lot of contact with doctors. It's provides an important perspective on the challenges they face.

A book that cuts to the heart of what it means to be human. I cannot wait for Dr. Campo's next book!

This is a book so rich in compassion, empathy, anger, satire, precision of observation and command of language, that it is a kind of medicine to treat the emotional coldness of our time.