Tuesday, May 04, 2010

News at Eleven: Many poems [in Dannie Abse's

New Selected Poems 1949-2009] bring various strands of experience together. In Case Study, a patient, unaware that the doctor is both Welsh and Jewish, denigrates both.

"'Most Welshmen are worthless,/an inferior breed, doctor.'/He did not know I was Welsh./Then he praised the architects/of the German death-camps--/did not know I was a Jew./. . .When I palpated his liver/I felt the soft liver of Goering;/when I lifted my stethoscope/I heard the heartbeats of Himmler. . ." The clinic has a number of poisons: "Yet I prescribed for him/as if he were my brother."

from Mumbai Mirror: Physician and poet

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