For Medicine, Memoriam
Robert Charles Basner
ISBN 978-1-963908-63-3 88 pages pbk $18.00
ISBN 978-1-963908-70-1 88 pages hdc. $25.00
paperback
hardcover
R.C. Basner’s collection of elegiac poems remembers with the fidelity of art. This is mature work, marked by breath-taking use of the forms of poetry, its traditions, its technē as well as its ethos. Inscribed to poets, physicians, musicians, and artists, his poems summon haunted presences and absences to come. Some of those mourned were killed in the Holocaust, igniting rage along with grief. Although the poet is himself a physician, these are not poems “about” medicine but rather poems that emerge from the doctor’s inevitable grief regarding the nearness to death and the ultimate futility of impulses to heal. We welcome this powerful poetic voice, speaking at once the tongues of body, soul, and spirit.
Rita Charon, Columbia University
Given Robert Basner's distinguished background in medicine it is no surprise that this work is so expertly and exactly crafted. The rich and precise choices, delivered, yes, surgically, carry us with sensitivity and humility to the important places. This is fine, fine work and it is to be savored carefully. As carefully as it was created. I am better from reading it. Consider it. Receive it. Enjoy it.
Phillip X Levine, Poetry Editor, Chronogram Magazine
President, Woodstock Poetry Society
Robert Basner’s poems are full of mystery and music. We must work hard at plumbing the depths of the sonorous poems of this latter-day Gerard Manley Hopkins, but we are the wiser for it. Archibald MacLeish famously wrote, “A poem should not mean, but be,” and Basner’s poems are, in all their rich complexity, in their tragic and cryptic beauty. He never lets us off the hook by providing meaning or morals. Rather he lets us see the world through his own sad, wise, brilliant doctor’s eyes. As elsewhere in For Medicine, Memoriam, Basner doesn’t let us look away in “Church and Majestic” : (“…I know now when next we speak/will be in the abiologic-/void our voices can have no touch in./But mine will tend towards yours.”). The consolation Basner offers is in his unique vision and in the exquisite delicacy of his words.
Elizabeth J. Coleman, Editor, Here; Poems for the
Planet (Copper Canyon Press, 2019)
Medicine. Nature. Music. Three realms where sentimentality hides what's truly valuable. In taut and compressed language that eschews any easy meanings Robert Basner's poems please the ear as well as the intellect. He brings a physician's incisive wisdom to bear on the most important elements of life, such as mortality, illness, faith, kinship, fate, art, and poetry. His own poetry is thrilling to behold.
Will Nixon, author of If Not In Heaven, Then In
Saugerties (Bushwhack Books, 2024)
Renowned physician, composer, and musician Robert Basner finds his rightful place in the tradition of Chekhov and William Carlos Williams with his first poetry collection, For Medicine, Memoriam. Wielding language with a conductor’s brio and surgeon’s precision, the poet beguiles with musical and innovative word play. In spare, masterful storytelling, Basner brings a sensory beauty and spiritual mystery to his powerful exploration of nature’s mutability, death’s inevitability, and personal loss.
Licia Hahn, Associate Fellow, Berkeley College, Yale
University; Founding Member, The Poetry Annex
This is an adventurous first book of poems by a senior physician who has encountered a wide variety of memorial events. The poems merit close re-reading. Not afraid of using a “brutalled language” in which nouns and verbs exchange their customary rôles, Basner invents variations and new purposes for old words in “[a] life that is languaged.” In this manner, a number of traditional subjects, the loss of friends, ekphrastic poems about artworks, and memories of places are distinctively refreshed.
Michael Salcman, retired neurosurgeon and art
critic, editor Poetry in Medicine, the anthology of
medical poems, author of Shades & Graces
(winner Daniel Hoffman Book Prize, 2000)
and Crossing the Tape (2024)
Robert Charles Basner, M.D., Columbia University Emeritus Professor of Medicine, is heir to the farms, fields, foliages, and fervents of place long slipping shyly off the Catskill Mountains. He also holds a Bachelor of Music degree from the City College of New York, where he studied composition and conducting. He currently lives in the Hudson Valley and travels to Berkeley. This is his first collection of poetry.
