I HEAR THEIR VOICES SINGING

A nurse practitioner and experienced writer offers a collection of poems.

Davis opens her volume of free-verse poetry with scenes of her nursing life: She stabs oranges with needles, washes urine from skin, and views an autopsy. Her observations reveal patients at their most vulnerable moments: a 16-year-old girl and her mother arguing about whether or not the teen will terminate her pregnancy; a 12-year-old rape survivor asking if she is still a virgin. The poet shows readers the most horrific cases of an intensive care unit: an abused baby, a boy hit by a car, a drowned child. She also delves into her own family, describing her mother’s funeral in one poem and her father’s death in another. In “March 28, 2001 / March 28, 1945,” the poet imagines how her mother felt, 56 years earlier, when she was pregnant with her while Davis’ father swept land mines in Italy. In “Becoming the Patient,” the poet’s professional and personal worlds collide as she confronts “the haze of could-die / could-get-better” during an epic hospital stay. Davis’ visceral language will seer into readers’ brains and evoke images more vivid than a medical documentary. She describes patients’ “crescendo of moans like sweet violins,” how a woman’s legs “jut up like ghosts” beneath the sheets, the way a tongue can turn into “a bed of coals” with fever, and how a woman who lost her lung function sounds like a barking dog. Davis’ unflinching honesty is evident in bold declarations, such as “I like being the one to give bad news— / I am not embarrassed by grief.” But she also brims with compassion and imparts the kind of caring one could only hope to have from the medical establishment: “How difficult it is, / how necessary, to stay at the bedside of the dying.” The book’s one fault is its 194-page length. Some poems unrelated to the collection’s theme could have been cut.

A haunting, powerful look at the professional and personal life of a nurse through poetry.