Alternative medicine

October 28, 2013
Compassionate, adept with inherited forms, and easy to follow, Campo (What the Body Told), in this sixth collection does justice to his many commitments. A Harvard Medical School physician who performs extensive clinic work and a gay man of Cuban-American heritage, Campo keeps readers aware of all these identities throughout his work, both essays and verse; here, though, he sorts them into the volume’s three parts. The first addresses his own childhood, his immigrant pride and his Cuban-American heritage: “ghost of Cuba, vestige of a dream,/ what makes me pity you?” The real power of the collection, and its real newness, comes in part two, devoted largely to a physician’s professional charges: patients with cancer, HIV, self-cutting, and other disorders. These become launch points for poems that combine human feeling with biomedical information, and they inspire from the poet clear metrical technique, as in the blank verse of “The Third Step in Obtaining an Arterial Blood Gas” or the pantoum that begins “I’m not a real doc without my white coat./ I could be anyone.” The third section looks at the poet’s love life and at more recent public events, including 9/11. A double villanelle, couplets, a sestina, strict unrhymed trimeters, and other challenges arrange the sometimes very general sentiments (“We are both/ voracious and limited by flesh”) into patterns reminiscent of Marilyn Hacker: they should please readers who seek such technical skill, readers who want a determinedly accessible poetry of contemporary gay life, and the many readers who want a doctor-poet as inviting and informative as Campo has become.

November 15, 2013
In his sixth book of poetry, physician and poet Campo addresses heritage, healing, and memory. He begins by portraying a child's inner turmoil in Havana; then, working nimbly, he illustrates how admiration is expressed by teasing in Wilhelmina Shakespeare, the throbbing recognition of God in New Jersey, the Garden State, and the simultaneous unreliability and power of memory in Pronk. Not only does he use his medical experience to articulate a uniquely tender understanding of those around him, Campo is also able to extract remarkable beauty from the seemingly decrepit. In Primary Care, he pleads with the body to remind us that we suffer . . . / that we must, or else we never lived. Campo is both concerned for and in love with the soul, the stars, and the infinite possibility of a world as terrifying as it is wondrous. In a style both precise and emotional, playful and earnest, Campo delivers a most extraordinary message: that in writing, in seeing, in remembering, and in being, we embody, simultaneously, the ache as well as the cure.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)