Naked Poems

Book excerpt: This slim volume is an innovative, thought-provoking, encouragement of the art and joy of reading poems. Its author is an internationally well-known psychopharmacologist who, at age eighty-two, revisits seventy-six poems derived from his personal and professional life, beginning at age fifty. The book opens by exploring the metaphor behind the title, the way in which words in poems mirror clothes in couture—each covering yet enhancing and revealing what lies beneath. In a preparatory exercise, this metaphor is expressed in four poetic forms—haiku, sonnet, classical, and free form—each examined to establish the sources of impact on the aesthetics, emotion, and intellect of the reader. The principles established are then applied by the reader, with the guidance of the author, to explore each of several poems in eight areas of life: introspection, humor and satire, travel and places, life and leisure, mental health matters, spiritual dimensions, age, and infirmity. The reader explores each poem with regard to form, posture on the page, imagery, metaphor, aesthetics, and structure, including syntax, rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and repetition. In total, this emphasizes the pithy way in which poetry can best prose in elegance, beauty, and brevity. In addition to sharing and enhancing the joy of reading poems, this includes an amateur’s effort to reverse the well-documented dwindling interest of people in the genre, perhaps contributed to by the increasingly esoteric, abstract, and obscure nature of contemporary poems.