Poem366: “Nursewifery” by Ruth Williams

Nursewifery by Ruth Williams

Nursewifery by Ruth Williams, Durham, North Carolina: Jacar Press, 2019

Ruth Williams’ elegant chapbook Nursewifery, from Jacar Press, is as clever and innovative collection as I’ve seen, and I hope that my introduction to it here might lead others to discover how special it is.

My mother was a nurse and my two sisters are, too, and I’m interested in the profession, though I was never in any danger of becoming a nurse myself. (Once, as a teenaged candystriper—which, admittedly, feels like the first line of a pornographic novel—I had the embarrassing experience of fainting on the job from witnessing something a little too intense for me. In a family of nurses, I ended up in the gift shop, in the very hospital where my mother was the night nursing supervisor. I’m sure she heard about my experience, but I can promise she didn’t hear it from me.)

Among the majority of the people in the world who are not nurses? Ruth Williams. But she is a feminist scholar with an interest in this woman-dominated profession, and she is also seemingly a student of history. The role of combat nurse captured her fascination acutely enough to produce this outstanding small collection about military field nurses from, seemingly, the era of Florence Nightingale—the Crimean War and thereafter. The nurse whose voice offers up the poems in Nursewifery wears a pinafore and works alongside horses, but the exact conflict in which she serves is unstated, unless I missed a clue somewhere.

The most fascinating thing Williams does is her focus on the different types of stitches nurses use to suture wounds. Some of the poems bear the names of stitches as titles—titles like “Vertical Mattress Suture,” “Locked Suture,” “Corset Plication Stitch,” “Far-Near Near-Far Modified Vertical Mattress Suture” (no, really …), and more.

It turns out that our means of repairing ripped or cut skin offer potent metaphors. She explains each stitch in an epigraph taken from the Medscape website. The quote to start “Deep Tip Stitch” offers a powerful example:

The deep tip stitch provides longer-term support than the traditional corner stitch and improves alignment of the tip with the sides of the closure.

The unnamed nurse persona who voices each poem identifies with this stitch:

We thought ourselves exceptional,

though we knew we were merely women

wearing uniforms to distinguish us, not as individuals,

but as a type of caring, a calm blue

stitch.

Williams continues in this voice, saying, “We pulled together // what could not otherwise be touched,” adding that ability was the nurses’ “special softness, // our elegant way of aligning the world.” I offer a lot of this small poem, but I’m really fascinated by how Williams takes something so prosaic and makes it in to such a powerful symbol. The life of the nurse is exactly like the description of the deep tip stitch, and Williams proves it.

As I savored this chapbook, I took time out to hit YouTube, where there are quite a few stitching demonstration videos, most of them featuring thick, fatty squares of fake human flesh, sort of Caucasian-ish on top and yellow underneath. As I looked up demos of each of the stitches Williams named, the same calm male voice explained how to execute each suture, and a video showed a hooked sewing needle manipulated by forceps. Throughout, he peppered some of the same jargon used by Williams; for instance, the first poke of the sewing needle through the skin seems to be called “the bite”—another strong metaphor.

Williams has much more than a good concept going for her, though. This is also a powerful collection, with the suture poems “stitched” throughout the book, which offers a daming critique of war and the harm it does.

One of my favorite poems in the collection is called “The Suitor,” which recalls a first dance with an early beau of the battlefield nurse. It continues,

Later, you’ll

find him again

on the table

red weather

between you.

This is a small poem, but it packs a dramatic wallop, and damage from war being referred to as “red weather” is highly arresting to me.

Williams is the author of two other collections, so her work shouldn’t be hard to find. I recommend you read her work—stat.

Poem366: "Assisted Living" by Erin Murphy

Assisted Living by Erin Murphy

Assisted Living by Erin Murphy, Phenix City, Alabama: Brick Road Poetry Press, 2018

In her seventh collection, Assisted Living, poet Erin Murphy offers 72 poems that are short — seven lines each, a form she invented called demi-sonnets — and very direct. I guess you have to be direct when your time in a poem is so brief. There is no lollygagging in seven lines, and in fact, Murphy’s brevity is a vehicle for razor-sharp insights.

To better understand Murphy’s project, and to make sure I wasn’t overlooking anything, I did a little bit of research on her form. Wikipedia verifies that demi-sonnets are a seven-line form (half a sonnet) that is often aphoristic — and that was certainly my experience — but they also “end with an internal full or slant rhyme.” I noticed some highly innovative rhyme in these poems, but I confess I didn’t see a pattern to it in most poems. That was the pleasure of them for me; I always enjoy rhyme best when it occurs in a surprising way. These micro-poems were surprising through and through — sonically, imagistically, rhetorically, and otherwise.

Speaking of rhetoric, to me the main hallmark of a sonnet is its rhetoric — how an Italian sonnet will offer an octet of problem that resolves in the sestet that follows, or how a Shakespearean sonnet will present its several little arguments before answering them in a tidy couplet. The patness of the rhetorical structure keeps me — and plenty of other contemporary readers, I suspect — at arm’s length. My problems aren’t tidy, and my solutions sometimes feel non-existent, which means that a sonnet’s shape doesn’t suit me at all well.

But do you know what? A demi-sonnet fits the bill beautifully. In these poems, the sonnet and its rhetoric are hacked off at the knees. As I mentioned at the outset, they are direct, but they sometimes don’t offer any resolution at all — and if they do, it’s of a fleeting sort.

I love very short poems, because it’s fun to include full poems in a review. This gives the reader a nice sampling (although I strongly suggested reading Assisted Living from its gorgeous front cover to its end. But here are a few of the poems I most enjoyed.

The first poem in the book was a powerful leap, like a first step onto the moon:

Reverse Alchemy

Forget bullion bricks

and gaudy chains around

the neck. I’m perfecting

the long tradition of turning

gold to lead. See: autumn

leaves. See: lust. See: everyone

you’ve ever loved who’s dead.

Like a conventional sonnet, it presents a problem and then offers some proofs. But the in-your-face quality is decidedly unsonnetlike — and as one who has recently lost someone special, I fully understood how sometimes everything turns to shit.

It’s a theme that was repeated later in the first section:

After the Worst Thing Happens

After the tears and bottomless grief

and hours spent staring at the night

ceiling with tight teeth, after the will

to move leaks from your body like ink

from a pen, there is a feeling of relief.

The worst thing that can happen

has happened and can’t happen again.

This final couplet is the perhaps the biggest nod to a conventional sonnet in the collection, with the slant rhyme in the final two line-ending words and the aphoristic feel of them. There is wisdom here.

Not all of the loss in these poems is personal. “Safety Drill” is a poem about Murphy’s daughter during an active shooter drill:

Safety Drill

In the event of an active shooter,

run in zig-zags behind the school,

my daughter is told. It's harder

to hit a moving target. Run across

the field to the woods. Don’t cower.

But: so many moving targets,

so many wind-blown flowers.

I feel that this poem, in its brevity and its natural imagery, leaves a haiku-like undertone behind. A lot is going on — rapidfire instructions, children transformed into flowers, and the pure lyric impulse of a mother-poet.

Finally, I appreciated the playfulness found in a collection that is often quite heavy, and I’d be remiss not to include an example. I’m also a sucker for a good love poem, and that’s what “Things Are Cuter in Twos” is:

Things Are Cuter in Twos

One Yorkie pup? Sweet enough.

Two? Adorbs! The singleton toddler

you’d never notice is awww-worthy

with his twin. My beau with double

vision can’t thread a needle or drive

at night. But he loves both of me.

What can I say? We’re a delight.

And Murphy is a delight, at times — and an insightful, innovative and skilled poet, always.