Dying for Beginners

By Patrick Clary and Cleo Qian

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 097776320X
• ISBN13: 9780977763207
• Release Date: December 2006
• Publisher: Lost Borders Press
• Length: 86 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.3" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Transcendent, encouraging, and masterful poetry

Patrick Clary's DYING FOR BEGINNERS is the work of a doctor from the school of hard knocks. I recently rediscovered his poetry, which was always deft, clever, and reached out to the reader compassionately. But time and the poet's 20 years as a hospice doctor and patient advocate have worn away his sharp edges and left a resonant humanity. Clary writes about the incandescent in ordinary and extraordinary moments, weaving them together into fine literary cloth: remembering a dead parent, how to stay alive in combat, meeting Jim Jones, handling hospital emergencies, fishing with his sons, and losing a wife. Any lover of literature would adore discovering this book. Nicole J. Burton, Author, Swimming Up the Sun: A Memoir of Adoption

Poetry to reflect upon the issues of death and dying

Patrick Clary draws upon his more than twenty years of professional and personal experienced as a hospice physician in his poetry to reflect upon the issues of death and dying. Dr. Clary's verse reveal that death can be as miraculous as birth and that living well, living fully, living each hour of each day to the fullest, is the best of all possible preparations for the inevitable experience of dying. "A Jig For My Wake": I wore loud ties bought for/50 cents in thrift shops on/Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn loved/Women from any safe distance/Lived in a suburb/Rode terrified motorcycles/Loved the abyss walked/On the grills over subways wrote/Poems loved drink from no distance/At all and lovely Irish reels//Play your tin whistles your pipes and your bones/Sing those songs I wrote for your voices of bourbon/Bury me in a suburb with my face in the rain/Under a stolen subway grill with my Wrecked Triumph to carry me up the Flatbush/Avenues of another world/Let your women fish like boys with gum to bait/The pennies on my eyes:/Bury me in a loud tie.