Peter Pereira

A physician as well as a poet, Pereira believes doctors in training should learn to appreciate and write poetry. His poems argue that those who do sharpen their attentiveness to patients and help themselves as well as any readers to better realize and be humbled by the persistence of suffering and its endurance and the responsibility for healing that the well bear toward the suffering. "What Is Lost," already used in many teaching situations, reports a clinical scene--the doctor conversing, via an interpreter, with a Khmer refugee about how to relieve her troubled sleep--with marvelous economy and, thanks to giddying focal shifts from scarred survivor to an entire brutalized nation, maximal power. That poem is one, not necessarily the best, in the book's first section, consisting of what might be called clinical poems. The second section's poems of identity and family, and the third's, concerned with Pereira's ordinary life as a gay man, reveal particulars that motivate this doctor's compassion and others that threaten to dilute it.