Selected Poems and Embers of a Medical Life
Edition: LIMITED EDITION
Publisher: International Foundation for Biosocial Development and Human Health
Published: 1998
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Format: Hardbound
Number of pages: 143
Copyright date: 1998
Subjects: Poetry
Genres: Personal Narrative; Cultural Expressions
Work titles: SELECTED POEMS FROM THE WRITER'S PUBLISHED WORK 1966 - 1998
First sentence: FROM FOREWARD:...............It was Vera Wainwright, whose own work had been established by Walter De La Mere, the Poet Laureate, who opened my eyes first to the unique symbolic value of Poetry. Vera Wainwright was the influence behind my first being sent to a catholic school, and those early years of education instilled an imprint on my mind. It was Vera Wainwright too who raised the idea that I should contemplate entering the priesthood. Later, when I graduated as a medical doctor she strongly urged me to become a medical missionary. These sensibilities as much as others merged to a preoccupation with the spiritual side of human experience, with introspective thought upon life and death, and with the cultural context of human societies.These have been a constant powerful theme in both my professional and personal life.
Description: A selection of the poems of the writer, some bound up in many ways with his life as a physician and educator. The poems themselves exhibit perceptible changes in tone, content, and expression over the half century during which they were written, 1949-1999. They vary from lines written in an  Anatomy Theatre, over two hundred years old, in a Medical College in Dublin, towards sombre exploration of verse written in Japan a half century later. The poetic expression is often introspective; oral and auditive in its tonal effect, sometimes dead in a temporal sense. Locations where the verse was written are as diverse as the Mojave Desert 1965 (Five Cantos); Easter Island in the South Pacific (Song Poetry); Red Square, Moscow, during a Soviet Union winter visit. The writer was influenced by Vera Stacey Wainwright, (who guided him as an aunt), and who herself wrote classical sonnets, one included by Walter de la  Mare in his Anthology "Love". In the main, "Vers Libre" characterises Day and his times,  and biopsychosocial forces mark his attitudes.
Table of contents: value: FOREWORD -About the Lines; value: AMERICAN NOTES - including Five Cantos (Mojave Desert 1965); Grand Canyon Views; Poems written in various locations in the United States; value: WAYFARER LINES - Poems written in various countries - Greece, India, Japan, USSR; value: POEMS FOR CHILDREN; value: SONG POETRY FROM EASTER ISLAND (Isla da Pascua, South Pacific Ocean); value: ON DEATH: THE BECOMING AND UNBECOMING - a selection of introspective and philosophical content