Selected Portraits

By: Ron Charach

October 2007
128 pages | ISBN 978-1-894987-20-2
$17.00

Selected Portraits celebrates selected poetry from Ron Charach’s seven previous collections. In these poems simple and familiar images are used to probe the complex depths of human relationships, whether between friends, a parent and child, or a doctor and patient. Charach encounters each living moment with compassion and humour, and extends it beyond itself to give the reader a glimpse of the human spirit within.

Psychiatrists on the Subway

One rarely spots psychiatrists on the subway
rubbing the haze of a long day’s sessions
from their lean temples,
or thumbing through paperbacks that deal
with anything-but.
Wouldn’t they like an update on who’s
in the world and how they’re doing?

Or would the ridership be wary of men and women
whose briefcases rattle with the tic tac
of pills, whose ears perk
like armadillos’ at conversations
two seats over?
More likely we locate them in a bad joke,
in a wing chair beside a firm couch,
a suicide statistic, a product seminar
with deli sandwiches courtesy of Pfizer or Roche
or Eli Lilly;
perhaps on the beach of a convention hotel
with a panorama of thong-clad beauties
who seldom talk revealingly.

Before bed a psychiatrist sets his ears
on the night table
and prays for a night of long silence
from a god who prefers
to listen.

Reviews

• Moments of Insight (Paul Finnegan, MD, The Canadian Medical Association Journal, 7/1/2008). “The reader thus encounters moments of insight and delight, and moments of puzzlement and heartache: each authentic, each affecting and each inviting self-reflection.”
• Medic Poetics (Shane Neilson, Arc Poetry Magazine 60: The Dog-eared Issue, 7/1/2008). “…he’s a star in Canadian medical circles, being one of the few Canadians —and a psychiatrist to boot— to feature abroad in anthologies of medical poetry.”

Other Titles by Ron Charach

• Cowboys & Bleeding Hearts: Essays on Violence, Health and Identity (2009)