Naked Poems

This slim volume is an innovative thought-provoking encouragement of the art and joy of reading poems. Its author is an internationally well-known psychopharmacologist who at age eighty-two revisits seventy-six poems derived from his personal and professional life beginning at age fifty. The book opens by exploring the metaphor behind the title the way in which words in poems mirror clothes in couture--each covering yet enhancing and revealing what lies beneath. In a preparatory exercise this metaphor is expressed in four poetic forms--haiku sonnet classical and free form--each examined to establish the sources of impact on the aesthetics emotion and intellect of the reader. The principles established are then applied by the reader with the guidance of the author to explore each of several poems in eight areas of life: introspection humor and satire travel and places life and leisure mental health matters spiritual dimensions age and infirmity. The reader explores each poem with regard to form posture on the page imagery metaphor aesthetics and structure including syntax rhyme alliteration assonance and repetition. In total this emphasizes the pithy way in which poetry can best prose in elegance beauty and brevity. In addition to sharing and enhancing the joy of reading poems this includes an amateurs effort to reverse the well-documented dwindling interest of people in the genre perhaps contributed to by the increasingly esoteric abstract and obscure nature of contemporary poems.