Song of a Reformed Headhunter

TLS February 6 2009 from Michael Stanley-Baker's review of A Dictionary of the Huang Di Nei Jing Su Wen : The roots of Chinese medicine lie in the rich textual tradition that began with the Inner Classic of the Yellow Emperor , or Huang Di Nei Jing , compiled over 2,000 years ago. The first organized canon of medical theory, the Inner Classic describes a range of ideas about the structure and patterns of the universe and the human body, from five-phase correlative cosmology, to yin and yang, qi and blood, acupuncture meridians and the relationship between the inner organs.  * "Heaven" and "breath," for example, form the term "weather". Thus "breath" not only animates the human body, but also storms, rainbows and hazy summer days. Small wonder then that Chinese doctors use terms for weather patterns when diagnosing the human body as well.  *** from Ronald Blythe's review of Katherine Swift's The Morville Hours : A book of hours was a...

Get Over It Poetry by Miriam Stanley 84 pages. Rogue Scholars Press. 2009. ISBN: 0-977-1550-6-4 ISBN13: 978-0-977-1550-6-4 The subjects in Miriam Stanley’s second book of poems are depressing—mental illness, divorce, man’s inhumanity to man—but their effect is not. These poems, burning with anger, hurt and despair, give a light that does not dazzle nor flicker, but stares steadily at the world that meets its eyes. The book is organized according to three broad topics. The first group of poems describes Stanley’s work with mentally ill patients. The second deals with familial relationships, including a grandmother’s Alzheimer’s, and a marital break-up. In the final group of poems, the poet extends her vision to take in historical and current political conflicts, in particular, the Israeli-Palestinian situation in the Middle East. What unites these disparate strands of experience is the perspective of a Jewish woman, a troubled feminist; what lenses these different scenes into a cohesive...