Alternative Medicine

Compassionate, adept with inherited forms, and easy to follow, Campo (What the Body Told), in this sixth collection does justice to his many commitments. A Harvard Medical School physician who performs extensive clinic work and a gay man of Cuban-American heritage, Campo keeps readers aware of all these identities throughout his work, both essays and verse; here, though, he sorts them into the volume’s three parts. The first addresses his own childhood, his immigrant pride and his Cuban-American heritage: “ghost of Cuba, vestige of a dream,/ what makes me pity you?” The real power of the collection, and its real newness, comes in part two, devoted largely to a physician’s professional charges: patients with cancer, HIV, self-cutting, and other disorders. These become launch points for poems that combine human feeling with biomedical information, and they inspire from the poet clear metrical technique, as in the blank verse of “The Third Step in Obtaining an Arterial Blood Gas” or the pantoum that begins “I’m not a real doc without my white coat./ I could be anyone.” The third section looks at the poet’s love life and at more recent public events, including 9/11. A double villanelle, couplets, a sestina, strict unrhymed trimeters, and other challenges arrange the sometimes very general sentiments (“We are both/ voracious and limited by flesh”) into patterns reminiscent of Marilyn Hacker: they should please readers who seek such technical skill, readers who want a determinedly accessible poetry of contemporary gay life, and the many readers who want a doctor-poet as inviting and informative as Campo has become. (Nov.)