Poetry review – TAXONOMIC VIGNETTES: Henry Schneiderman finds Alan Cohen’s poems to be a powerful mix of frank autobiography and lively imagination
Taxonomic Vignettes
Alan Cohen
Atmosphere Press
ISBN-13: 979-8891323933
Hardcover $22.99 Softcover $14.99 Electronic $9.99
For many decades, Doctor Alan Cohen practiced primary care medicine across the United States. He became a full-time poet upon retiring from patient care. His collection of poems, Taxonomic Vignettes, brims with lifelong portraits of friends and colleagues, told with a mixture of acute recollection, his distinctive voice, and perceived sense of loss over a lifetime. Among the recurring themes are loss of youth, dreams unfulfilled, disappearance of intimacy as characters change, and the pain of friends stolen by illness. Yet there is also humor, as in “Warning shot”, an unusually “medical” poem that will resonate equally with readers who are his fellow physicians and those who bring a lay perspective:
When he awakens his heart is pounding
He’s lived with this heart for 70 years
And it’s never pounded like this before
It’s always beat, never pounded
Whatever the emotion or provocation
...
A prophecy, a sign
Time short, limitations ahead
He’d been so proud of his regular heartbeat
So secure in it
Calls the doctor’s office
Offered an appointment
Next day at ten
Checks with his wife
…
She nods
And he accepts
Still wondering if he should have insisted
He could be dead by tomorrow
The poet experiences a strangely disembodied day of waiting but then …
Next morning, in the office
Exam and EKG both normal
Heartbeat once more percussive and steady as a pile driver
He’s re-established on the Earth
Perhaps, he thinks, not two years ahead but twenty
Internal evidence in the poem reveals that – in contrast to much of the book – this poem is not autobiographical.
Death forms a major shadow throughout the lifespan, addressed most poignantly and directly in “Anatomy of an improbable friendship”, which tells a sad story of displacement, loss, and unexpected death in middle age. “Anatomy of an improbable friendship” also shows how deliberately Cohen selects jarring, anti-singsong language and cadence, clearly to the purpose of awakening the reader to attend to content, rather than succumb to the tempation to drowse at beautiful language.
Between dinners
Anita and I moved from IA to MA to CT to IL
(Small HMO, large HMO, Yale, U of IL & the VA)
While N. consolidated her position at St. Francis
And moved up in the ranks of the ACP
Some of Doctor Cohen’s subjects will recognize themselves, and a few will bridle at the clear-eyed honesty in recounting their faults and how they ‘committed failure’. But perhaps most share his piercing honesty, one basis for mutual regard.
The sharpness of his observant eye, and his allusions, comes through on every page, as here where he uses the unforgettable phrase, ‘Cassandra moments’:
He wanted to be hazed and accepted
To hide; and was willing, eager
To surrender who he was
That was my first of many
Lifetime Cassandra moments
I had seen others go off the rails
But this time I lived, knew, and shared
The promise, pain, fear, and weakness
And said what I knew as warning
I might have been trying
To convince a fish to fly
Disasters abound in the lives delineated here. But there is also proportionate–not arbitrarily equitable– attention to strengths and gains and joys in those depicted lives:
We are, the best of us, mercifully resilient
Bend under squalls of chance and change
Endure, survive
But, predictably, bend only so far
And then spring back or break
These poems aggregately demand, in a compelling rather than authoritarian way, that the reader awaken from the cruise-control of quotidian life and reading, so as to acknowledge arrogance, distancing and a world that has changed as harshly as each aging human within it. Cohen is unsparing in portraits of friends who become penniless, professionally ruined, adrift or criminally convicted. He turns the same tough eye on himself–witness “Dumb blonde” in which he entertains the possibility of an unrecognized homoerotic element with a highschool friend:
Was I his?
It has taken me fifty years
To consider the possibility
I did always say:
“He was my best friend in high school”
Not
“We were best friends…”
I have no idea what he said
Or didn’t
In a long, deeply confessional autobiographical poem, Cohen reflects on a psychotherapist who breached professional boundaries while effectively treating Cohen’s family.
He violated every code and standard
Treated my mother, brother, sister, and me
Not as a group, but one at a time
And met with us socially
At restaurants, at home
The poet then goes into some detail about the extent of personal contact between therapist and patient and also reveals a little about his own psychological problems in order to be able to state triumphantly that
His care, rare, was the best gift I ever got
Without the least loss of my earliest self
I was put back right
Never spent a day in hospital
Never took a single pill
I’d call it magic, fiction
If I had not been there
What he did
Not evidence-based, conventional or politically correct
(A mercy that he was not stopped, restrained)
I used to think that it could only have come from love
For me or us or anyway rightness
Though looked at another way
He did what he did because he had to
You needn’t agree with every assertion in these poems to find a wealth of insights in them, and profound poetic statements, such as
What is our love for?
Is it pain, appreciation, gratitude, longing?
Do we want it to stop?
Is it ours?
Every reader should expect to squirm at numerous points in this powerful book. Insight, elevation and wry humor reward us richly if such discomfiture needs compensation. The power to challenge and discomfit is a mark of the success of these poems, and of the continuing courage of the man who previously edited The beast in a cage of words, a volume of poems about nuclear war.
Oct 9 2024
London Grip Poetry Review – Alan Cohen
Poetry review – TAXONOMIC VIGNETTES: Henry Schneiderman finds Alan Cohen’s poems to be a powerful mix of frank autobiography and lively imagination
For many decades, Doctor Alan Cohen practiced primary care medicine across the United States. He became a full-time poet upon retiring from patient care. His collection of poems, Taxonomic Vignettes, brims with lifelong portraits of friends and colleagues, told with a mixture of acute recollection, his distinctive voice, and perceived sense of loss over a lifetime. Among the recurring themes are loss of youth, dreams unfulfilled, disappearance of intimacy as characters change, and the pain of friends stolen by illness. Yet there is also humor, as in “Warning shot”, an unusually “medical” poem that will resonate equally with readers who are his fellow physicians and those who bring a lay perspective:
The poet experiences a strangely disembodied day of waiting but then …
Internal evidence in the poem reveals that – in contrast to much of the book – this poem is not autobiographical.
Death forms a major shadow throughout the lifespan, addressed most poignantly and directly in “Anatomy of an improbable friendship”, which tells a sad story of displacement, loss, and unexpected death in middle age. “Anatomy of an improbable friendship” also shows how deliberately Cohen selects jarring, anti-singsong language and cadence, clearly to the purpose of awakening the reader to attend to content, rather than succumb to the tempation to drowse at beautiful language.
Some of Doctor Cohen’s subjects will recognize themselves, and a few will bridle at the clear-eyed honesty in recounting their faults and how they ‘committed failure’. But perhaps most share his piercing honesty, one basis for mutual regard.
The sharpness of his observant eye, and his allusions, comes through on every page, as here where he uses the unforgettable phrase, ‘Cassandra moments’:
Disasters abound in the lives delineated here. But there is also proportionate–not arbitrarily equitable– attention to strengths and gains and joys in those depicted lives:
These poems aggregately demand, in a compelling rather than authoritarian way, that the reader awaken from the cruise-control of quotidian life and reading, so as to acknowledge arrogance, distancing and a world that has changed as harshly as each aging human within it. Cohen is unsparing in portraits of friends who become penniless, professionally ruined, adrift or criminally convicted. He turns the same tough eye on himself–witness “Dumb blonde” in which he entertains the possibility of an unrecognized homoerotic element with a highschool friend:
In a long, deeply confessional autobiographical poem, Cohen reflects on a psychotherapist who breached professional boundaries while effectively treating Cohen’s family.
The poet then goes into some detail about the extent of personal contact between therapist and patient and also reveals a little about his own psychological problems in order to be able to state triumphantly that
You needn’t agree with every assertion in these poems to find a wealth of insights in them, and profound poetic statements, such as
Every reader should expect to squirm at numerous points in this powerful book. Insight, elevation and wry humor reward us richly if such discomfiture needs compensation. The power to challenge and discomfit is a mark of the success of these poems, and of the continuing courage of the man who previously edited The beast in a cage of words, a volume of poems about nuclear war.