“A twenty first century William Carlos Williams.” –Booklist “Berlin’s writing sheds all doctrines and poses. He seems to me to be a person who is living his whole life in an effort to find something, which can never be located or described. In one of those beautiful passages that left me breathless, Berlin writes, ‘a doctor becomes/like a man who has spent sixty years/on a lobster boat, watching the world/swim fast and shining, right before his eyes.’ These lines, like much of Berlin’s poetry, seem to be about the revelation that emerges at the edge between our knowledge of the world, provided to us by science or maturation, and the chaotic understructure that throws up in front of us surprises that are both wanted and unwanted. Berlin has mastered a crisp, narrative style, etching descriptions with brevity and clarity. For example, the poem ‘Brought by Police from the Golden Gate Bridge’ describes the horrible repetitive suicide cases of nearly dead but still living patients. Alongside the storyteller, we encounter a doctor . . . who descends into darkness in order to find light. In ‘Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy’ the doctor-speaker encounters ‘another broken heart’s/beaten down story of futility and resilience.’ Berlin seems to live with the courage of undaunted individualism, and unusual honesty . . . as in ‘Midnight Rounds,’ he describes patients in a hospital at midnight, ‘their shriveled skin/ like moldy frescoes in an untended church/ after the faithful leave for another god.’ Practice contains the poems of a sturdy, unadorned man who is not hiding behind anything, and who is not driven towards something. He is standing there observing, feeling, and interpreting the world to a broad audience of intimate listeners. He describes himself so evocatively as anxious while on vacation, ‘I can be at peace/ when I am with my patients or at home . . . ’ He might have added that his fate, as it emerges in the poems in this book, is in the orientation to life that words expose when they reveal truths that spring up inside of coherent, beautiful language.” –Paul R. Fleischman, author of Wonder: When and Why the World Appears Radiant and other books

Practice

Literature & Fiction

Berlin, Richard M.

Poetry

Brick Road Poetry Press

Poetry. Selected for the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry. The poems in psychiatrist Richard M. Berlin's second collection, SECRET WOUNDS, explore the emotional terrain of doctor-patient relationships and how doctors' vulnerabilities and psychological scars become the secret wounds they must bear. "(Although) Berlin's subject matter is inherently interesting...medicine is not the excuse for these poems; it is simply their occasion...Berlin's poems are sure, spare, and always open to the task of revealing the mysteries he is privy to."—Gary Young

Secret Wounds: poems

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Alternative Medicine

BkMk Press

Selected for the 2002 Pearl Poetry Prize by Lisa Glatt, this award-winning collection recounts physician Richard M. Berlin's lifelong love affair with medicine. From his youthful dreams of saving his gravely ill father to the long years of training that eventually lead to his chosen field of psychiatry, Berlin offers a rare, poignant glimpse into one doctor's world through poems that are honest and unflinching, gentle and brutal at once.

How JFK Killed My Father

Pearl Editions

Tender Fences

Dos Madres Press

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Books by Berlin, Richard M.