Saying the World

by Peter Pereira and Cleo Qian

Book Overview

Winner of the Hayden Carruth Award by a doctor-poet who draws inspiration from his inner-city medical practice.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1556591977
• ISBN13: 9781556591976
• Release Date: October 2003
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Length: 78 Pages
• Weight: 0.38 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Hooked on words from the start...

I go to Highline Community College close to where the author works. He stopped by today to read some of his work. Now bear in mind that I am only 24 and a man. The last thing I ever thought I would enjoy was poetry about being a doctor. From the moment he opened his mouth to the second I realized he had finished, I was stuck listening to him. I was stuck visualizing what he was doing. It was absolutely wonderful and I give him my highest recommendation.

From the NYU Literature and Medicine database

This three-part collection of poems offers powerful images and vignettes from the life of a family practitioner living and working among the urban poor. The first section is the most explicitly medical in theme, including poems that pay painful tribute to a mother after stillbirth, a hydrocephalic child, an addict covered with boils, a young man murdered at eighteen, an old man with a failing heart. The second section weaves images from the writer's personal story together with those from his life as physician, and the third focuses primarily on life lived as a gay man among the sick and dying, patients to be treated and friends to be mourned while life remains to be claimed and savored. Despite the pain and grief attested to in many of the poems, a lively voice of clarity, compassion, and consent to the goodness of life even on hard terms gives the collection a defining note of celebration. Pereira's lines about a bereaved Cambodian seamstress suggest something true about his own work: ". . . she joins the circle / of other Khmer women to sew. / Punctuating the fabric / with yellow thread, finding her remnants / into a piece that will hold." ("What is Lost") Clearly the work of a physician whose heart has been opened by personal suffering, they are also beautifully crafted poems, unpretentious, frank, and accessible, but rich with memorable lines that offer a precision of feeling that is perhaps the best testimony of the quality of attention we hope for in a caregiver and keeper of words. Highly recommended especially to those who work where suffering is daily and visible. -- Marilyn Chandler McEntyre

Multi-faceted gems

Pereira's poems are gems of observation, of reflection; they're resonance of the world in words. Every poem in this collection satisfies. They layer astute and acute observations--about people, relationships, and nature--often ending with with a twist or a point of summation that can almost take your breath away...in wonder, in peace, and sometimes, in shock. Pereira's poems reflect and explore a wide range of topics, from medical procedures and mysteries of healing and illness, immigrants' struggles, his family, gardening and cooking, and even something as seemingly prosaic as his household's car being stolen--which turns into an ode to a "love-lost" misguided teenage girl. I highly recommend this volume. Pereira's poems are both very accessible and intriguing. They also offer complexities and subtleties that invite re-reading for more enjoyment and deeper understanding.

From Eclectica Review, Gilbert Wesley Purdy

Peter Pereira, the author of Saying the World, is a doctor. In an age where most drama is experienced vicariously through the television and movies, or through pre-packaged, safety-tested "experience products" such as theme parks and two-week package tours, the hospital is one of the few remaining places where the drama is real. Each of us shares in it for brief periods. The doctor lives it as a life.Saying the World is presented in three sections. The first is dedicated to Pereira's experiences as a doctor and clinician. He has the good sense not to try to compete with high drama television shows such as E.R. As he reflects, in the poem "Nosophilia," which is given as an epigraph to the volume:For one it's insomnia, tremor, migraine.Another has hangnails, hives, boils.Airsick. Seasick. Incontinent. Fat.Such misery loves company: a listening ear.The drama of the poems is as quiet as-generally, as inconsequential as-the drama of most real experience.Even Pereira's own internship is as drab and exhausting as it is fascinating. One moment bleary, lectured on "the minutiae of Fluid Management," the next he is wide-eyed, marveling at having completed his first Cesarean section. The next he is delivering a postmortem baby, tending a junkie, giving a check-up to an open-heart patient.It is all real, grueling, repetitive. At times it all becomes too much, and one is paid "The Wages of Mercy":I wonder for a moment what allthe commotion is about,nurses frantically starting IVsand drawing blood andplacing EKG electrodes;it's only death-Perhaps it is not just emotional exhaustion. Perhaps it is wisdom, at last. After the endless round of systoles and diastoles, Percocets and morphine drips, hydrocephalic babies and congestive heart failures, perhaps it is both.In the best poems from Saying the World, the doctor is listening to the obsessive, rambling soliloquies of the survivors who have lost loved ones. These are devastating poems. In "Litany," a Cambodian father who came to the United States to escape the terror of the Pol Pot regime loses his teenage son to a drive-by shooting. Between the description of a son being lost to the streets, of a father hoarse with chanting prayers to help his soul to be reborn, the poem has a refrain-an unusual thing for a contemporary poem-as the father repeats "If only I'd...":If only I'd given him the five dollarsIf only I'd asked him to stay, make his grandmother another cup of teaThe two go to the pagoda to pray the boy on his way. "I join him," Pereira recalls:...singing the phowa,and dwell for a moment in that radiant doorwaywhere birth becomes deathand death becomes birth:one hand washing the other.Such moments stay with him. His spare, unadorned style makes sure that they stay with us.for full review go to http://www.eclectica.org/v8n1/purdy_pereira.html

I feel wiser for having read it.

Peter Pereira's first collection, "Saying the World," is utterly lovely, deeply moving. His poems have been called "complex" and I'd agree. But Pereira has managed something amazing--he suggests the deep complexities of a life and yet again and again pinpoints moments of clarity, purity. We witness so much through these poems: the life of a doctor, the death of a young sister, the difficulties of romantic love. Grief cozies up to forgiveness which cozies up to play. Each is miraculous because we are in the presence of a voice that we trust, that is wise. I'm thinking particularly of the poem, "The Wages of Mercy," but also "Litany," "Senseless Beauty," and "Coming Home Late." Maybe it's acceptance that drives this book and which makes me wish for it in my own life. I love the arrangement of it. The medical poems in the first section thrust the reader immediately into life and death. These are moments Lived (capital L), and they set a powerful backdrop for the personal poems that come later--they raise the stakes on everything. Some of my favorite poems are the ones that bring in family--"The Boy who Played with Dolls," "Suite for a Sister," and "In August, My Sister" which is a haunting love poem and meditation on being childless. I love the light touch I see too, in poems like "Shadow and Spirit," the magic in "Loft Bedroom." Most of all, and best of all, "Saying the World" is bigger than the sum of its parts. I feel wiser for having read it. That is a rare gift in any book.