Synopses & Reviews
These writings, together with Dr. Robert Coles's enthusiastic appraisal of teaching Williams and Dr. William Eric Williams's personal and touching filial account, "My Father, the Doctor," make up an intriguing and timely study of the poet as a physician of rare humanity and self-knowledge. As Coles suggests, Dr. Williams's writing can help many others take a knowing look at the medical profession.
Review
"Stories written with the swift, concise, unsentimental exactitude of a great diagnostician who also happened to be a great poet." Philip Gourevitch
Review
"Impoverished patients was the rich literary lode his muse mined late every evening [or] snatched from his busy practice." The Book List
Review
"This is powerful but not comfortable reading, in the prose of a poet and the vision of a healer. I wish...all doctors could read it. He was a good man and a good poet, for both of which we, with Dr. Coles, 'as many in New Jersey had occasion to say during the first half of this century, say and say again: Thank you, Dr. Williams.'" The Wall Street Journal
Synopsis
Not only for students and doctors, this volume contains Williams's thirteen "doctor stories," several of his most famous poems on medical matters, and "The Practice" from .
About the Author
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) was born in Rutherford, New Jersey. He received his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, where he met and befriended Ezra Pound and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). At the same time as maintaining a popular medical practice, he became a prolific poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright. Experimenting with new techniques of meter and lineation, Williams sought to invent an entirely fresh--and singularly American--poetics, whose subject matter was centered on the everyday circumstances of life and the lives of common people. He was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2009.Robert Coles is a child psychiatrist and writer who has spent his life doing documentary work. He lives in Concord, Massachusetts.