titicus loop by Richard Weiss

Weiss’s poetry opens the door to a physician’s heart—whether attending a patient in the emergency room at 2AM, counseling a patient with a terminal disease or escaping to fish or bike it explores the fragile landscape of aging, illness, loss and grief.

We peek into his consultation room as he speaks…” we talked of the bell shaped curve. The hope/ to be on the skinny end where everything worked” and then hear his own voice in recollection of “those steamy summers when my youth was heat/ enough to ignite me”

These elegiac poems resound with wisdom, profound sympathy and great beauty.

–Robert K. Massie—Pulitzer Prize winning author of Nicholas and Alexandra, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

The speakers of Titicus Loop inhabit liminal spaces, thresholds between the living and the lost—shorelines, examination rooms, a bike path, a hospice—tenuous and temporary intervals that remind us of “the thinness of the line / that separates the seasons.” Elegaic, keenly attuned to internal and external weather, these poems document moments at the edges of living, in coastal environments and in the life of the body, with a physician’s acumen, a fisherman’s patience, and a lover’s tenderness. Witness to the tidal griefs of illness and mortality, these poems never permit loss to subsume the passions, the “Back Eddy” that recurs and ignites: “A wedge of sun slips beneath summer drawn shades / setting dust motes afire.”
–B. K. Fischer author of St. Rage’s Vault

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]