The Flower Can Always Be Changing by Shawna Lemay

I imagine receiving answers about geraniums being overwintered, about African violets, and about bouquets of grocery store tulips and about long stemmed, candy coloured daisies, and roses that deliberately open.

I forge a plan which I quickly abandon, to ask women I know about the plants they have on their windowsills, kitchen tables, desks. The leaves would most certainly see things happen. Quickly followed by the wish she remain unnamed. In its leaves she might see things happen. The flower can always be changing.” There would be, “…a perpetual crumbling and renewing of the plant.

Unbalanced but splendid and we understand each other illegibly.Īt the stage where she was dreaming, conjuring, The Waves, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, “A lamp and a flower pot in the center. It became too lush and I could not be severe in bringing it back to balance. Relegated to the basement when it sensed I was not living up to its requirements for emptiness, calm, and a true tenderness. A wish, a pretension, a desire for peacefulness, with an envious thought to the serious practitioners, precipitated its purchase. Purchased years ago from the hardware store. work left me with a sense of completeness, of someone having come full circle through challenge and heartache-back to health.The bonsai, now. Neilson reflects on his gradual recovery in taut, finely-wrought prose conveying tough-minded thoughts- The Malahat Review This is a memoir as memoir should be.- Free Range Reading Blog

What he has written is a raw-boned, devastating, unflinching, uncomfortable and fiercely honest portrait of his life as a doctor and a poet… Gunmetal Blue is about a man finding his voice both as a physician and as a scribe. Taught to research clinical questions, he took this scientific practice and made it a literary one: how can a doctor better know his patients, and how does this translate into self-knowledge? Poetry and medicine are topics intertwined since the time of the Greeks and, in this case, the connection between the two literally becomes his lifeline. Medicine might be considered the more productive activity by society, but Neilson found poetry in every office visit. Tempered with memoir and populated with poetic case studies, Neilson learns about himself as his patients reveal their frailties. Gunmetal Blue is an investigation of how to be in the world-how to be a doctor, how to be a poet, and how to be both.

The Flower Can Always Be Changing by Shawna Lemay