Holy the Body

Arthur Ginsberg is a physician specializing in neurology and also a gifted poet. In combination, he has created a truly unique book, a hymn to the human body in all its sacred aspects. Here you will find carefully-crafted poems celebrating the mysteries of the conscious and unconscious brain, the spine, the heart, the hand, the ear, the skin, the blood, and other elements of the body. I recommend reading the concluding poem first---it lends its title to that of the book---and then proceeding to others in the list. Ginsberg's poetry has subtlety, imagination, elegant and original turns of phrase. It will be of particular interest to those involved with health care, but anyone who loves modern poetry will be drawn to this book.

John Lawrence Nazareth

Holy the Body is Dr. Arthur Ginsberg's declaration of love for our frail humanity: "each body part / handled like a reliquary." His evocative descriptions blend a physician's grounding in science with deep reverence for the miracle of life: "Peering through the thousand-power lens / I wander through a colony of white blood cells, / track their spiny membranes through rivers / meandering to every part of the kingdom." Dr. Ginsberg invites us to stand with him by his patient's bedside and make ourselves vulnerable to their life and to their death in equal measure: "drinking in the puckered, red faces / inhaling life, the bubbles on tiny lips," and "Then, the letting go, his jaw unclenching / like a clamshell, into a prophetic smile." His poems are a powerful reminder of a physician's duty to care: "I must go back to the man dying / in white linen, and say nothing more / than the warmth of my hands on his." Holy the Body is an urgently necessary collection of poems in an era where bureaucratic, mechanized medicine lays siege to our humanity: "the world is strangling in ink / and paper, that neon patterns on oscilloscopes / are something we have invented to detach us / from matters of the heart."

Ruth Kohen