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'Stones' offers heavy, heartfelt read
By Sara Johansen
Library Communications
Posted 12/14/2007
MADISON, Wis. – Michael Salcman dissects the poetry of surgery in the latest Parallel Press chapbook Stones in Our Pockets. 
The 31-poem collection addresses both the visceral and pulsing realities of life in free-form verse to unite the spirit with the biology of the heart and brain.
Crossing any barriers one might place between art and science, Salcman mixes Proustian references with medical Latin to create a collection of poems that marvel at the intricacy of the human body and at the medical arts that can restore it.
The poem “Miraculous Recovery” describes the delicate balance between the body’s physical ability to function and its intangible resolve to persevere. Salcman writes: “All day we work to peel the tumor/ from the side of his brain stem—where / the heart beats, the lungs breathe / and dreams know no difference from illusion.”
Salcman brings a fresh voice to the time-old themes of life and death. He recounts the persistence of the heart in “Intensive Care,” in which he is called to examine the mostly unresponsive body of a young girl. “But her killer heart lights up / on the monitor, orange and red, / it winks and whistles at me, / beating the tattoo of its victory,” he writes.
Salcman is a physician, brain scientist and essayist on the visual arts. He was chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore. Recent poems appear in the Ontario Review, Harvard Review, Raritan, Notre Dame Review, River Styx and New York Quarterly. His work has been heard on NPR’s All Things Considered and in Euphoria, a documentary on the brain and creativity (2005). He is the author of six medical textbooks and three previous chapbooks of poems. His first collection, The Clock Made of Confetti, was published by Orchises Press in 2007.
The Parallel Press is an imprint of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries. For more information, visit http://parallelpress.library.wisc.edu/chapbooks/poetry.
Orders may be sent to:
The Parallel Press
372 Memorial Library
728 State Street
Madison, WI 53706
Phone: (608) 262-2600
Romantic Organ
In daylight, I don’t know the heart at all.
I have seen it in a jar, each muscle fiber matted
by formaldehyde
submerged in the gray-green light, held to the window,
like a tuberous plant among the lilies.
I have held it in my hand while it rested
between penultimate beats
and plunged a finger through its sucking
valves while life swirled red and frantic.
I have seen its chambers magnified many fold
by electrons and invoked in prayer.
I have seen it on the point of a maniac’s knife
and punctured by a bullet; in the eyes
of a friend’s wife or my own children
I have seen it broken but have never known it
like an Aztec might holding it up to the sun.
Only you have seen the one I carry like lead
inside me;
I don’t know the daylight heart at all.
