Choices

Any Good Poem

Richard Berlin, MD, shares the poem "Choices," by Tess Gallagher. Gallagher was a poet, playwright, essayist, and novelist, born in 1943 in Port Angeles, Washington. She received a BA and MA from the University of Washington, where she studied creative writing, and earned an MFA from the University of Iowa.

Gallagher’s first collection of poems, Instructions to the Double (Graywolf Press), won the 1976 Elliston Book Award for “best book of poetry published by a small press.” In 1984, she published the collection Willingly, which consists of poems written to, and about, her third husband, author Raymond Carver, who died in 1988. Other collections include My Black Horse: New and Selected Poems.

About her work, the poet Hayden Carruth wrote, “Gallagher’s poems, beyond their delicacy of language, have a delicacy of perception, and the capacity to see oneself objectively as another person doing the things one really does, with clear affection and natural concern.”

Dr Berlin has been writing a poem about his experience of being a doctor every month for the past 27 years in Psychiatric Times in a column called “Poetry of the Times.” He is instructor in psychiatry, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, Massachusetts. His latest book is Tender Fences.