Comfort Measures Only: New and Selected Poems, 1994-2016

Book Title: Comfort Measures Only: New and Selected Poems, 1994-2016

Book Author: Rafael Campo

Publication Information: Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2018, 166 pp., $22.95 paperback; $84.95 hardcover (cloth), $22.95 ebook

I received Comfort Measures Only on a Monday, and sat rapt until after midnight reading the poems and a delightful bit of Campo prose— his preface titled “Illness as muse.” He tells us, as had been my experience in our morning poetry huddle, that reactions about the truth can be…complicated. I laughed out loud when he described his spouse once suggesting to him, “Honey, maybe you should think about lightening things up a bit.”1 He quarrels directly with any view of illness as romantic or metaphoric, at least for the patient. And like his poems, his preface tells the story of his experience and that of his patients. An experienced physician poet, he seems to move through the world collecting the essence of what a poem is: concentrated artful penetrating words that move us. Sometimes moving us literally, as he describes the power of words in old Cuban songs that inspired his grandmother as she again “danced the merengue…No wonder I have come to believe in the power of the imagination if not to cure, then to heal” (p 4).

Tuesday mornings in our clinic huddle, I offer a poem. Not an acronym POEM (patient-oriented evidence that matters), but a poem. I have been lucky to do this now for 8 years and as there are seasons to any practice, at first I wasn’t sure that it mattered, but when I would be away, people would ask for a poem, and my staff and faculty began to offer their own poems. Patients and physicians eventually, organically, began to write and read poems and now we have framed poems on the walls, because stories and words matter, and help, and shape us. Years ago, staff would balk at poems that challenge or were considered “dark,” they would say, “we need something light.” But after a while, trust developed and they would say more honest things about circumstances poems reminded them of, and one day the most vocal critic conferred in the hall, “You know I wasn’t sure about this poetry thing, but that poem told the truth, didn’t it?” And it had.

On Tuesday I read aloud Campo’s poem “Addiction.” It captured our huddle, with its opening:

“Do trees crave sunshine?” The personification of trees and the beautiful and powerful first line pulls us into wondering about beautiful things … and terrible things.

Do trees crave sunshine? Could the neighbors’ boy
not live without his dreams of paradise?
I’d watch him peering out of his window, sky

above him blue and innocent, like it
might really break his fall. I promised that
I’d never touch the stuff again, but light

has this way of lying to you, betraying
you, telling you your mind is not decaying.
That you’re not really crazy to be seeing

things, beauty maybe, maybe even hope.
“I need to get my hands on some good dope,”
he said… (p 155).

The staff critics in the hallway murmured, “who wrote that?” and “That captures the opiate crisis?” and “…have we heard from Anthony?” (our patient who hadn’t been in for a week for his buprenorphine), and bets that trees do crave sunshine. This is what poems are supposed to do. Pure phenomenology that gets at intentionality, patient and provider experience nestled somewhere on the horizon. This book of poetry functions as a tour de force medical text focused on perception that is human enough for the lay reader (though they are more likely to find it stark), while for a physician or medical provider, this is the stuff that provides oxygen and glucose to our very cellular experience as providers.

Raphael Campo has been a physician and writer throughout his career as an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and has been writing, teaching, and thinking about writing for more than 22 years. He is a critic of writing as well, and in a 2004 Boston Review article he wrote regarding form that “…poetry in a world as richly diverse as ours need not be so rigidly and simplistically categorized.”2 The same might be said of his poems, as he displays a deep knowledge and mastery in playing with poetic form, as much as he challenges medicine “push(ing) back against the impersonal norms… of a strictly biomedical paradigm.” As is always the case, the interesting questions come from borders at the intersection of ideas, and I say Campo provides a medical text as important as any other. Luckily, his comes in the form of engaging poetry.