Callista Markotich

Doctoring in Nicaragua by Greg Stidham has the double effect of making me grateful and making me humble. The gratitude is complex. I am grateful that there are people like Greg Stidham who put themselves on the front line of suffering: illness, accidents, conditions chronic, acute and congenital with their doctors’ bags of hope, understanding and compassion, not to mention their professional skills and labour. But the gratitude is personal too. Poems such as Imagine makes one appreciate good health and good fortune every day that they are the reality. These are poems written straight from the heart, introducing a spunky girl called Clare, a baby still warm and still loved, a boy’s heart “drumming” blues with blue lips, blue fingertips. Sometimes the author, too, is personal. His life-long compassion for bereaved parents shines through several of these poems, and his wry self-knowledge is an empathetic feature in poems such as New Epileptic, and Anatomy Lab. As for the sense of humility engendered in this reading, I hope that in similar circumstance I could and would emulate the courage shown by the subjects of these poems, and their author. I wonder.