"In the early autumn of 2002 my lovely wife, Jean, was diagnosed with a melanoma of the sinus, a very lethal form of cancer. This is a story of how we tackled this disaster through our Christian faith and preserved our sanity during a traumatic two-year journey."

The book was primarily written to fulfil a promise that Peter made to Jean to tell the Christian side of her story to her family whom she loved so much, in the hope that they too would embrace the Christian faith and be reunited with her in heaven. Besides suffering, Peter also tackles the controversial debate of why Christ is the only true path to the Father, as well as describing the context of the spiritual battle within which we conduct our daily existence. Christianity is presented as a relationship rather than a religion.

Peter also shares some very practical advice on how to cope with a terminally ill loved one within the shortcomings of current medical science and in a materialistic, fast-paced city like Johannesburg.

Drawing on the proceedings of two conferences organized to celebrate the centenary of John Berryman's birth in 2014, John Berryman: Centenary Essays provides new perspectives on a major US American poet's work by critics from Ireland, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. In addition to new readings of important aspects of Berryman's development - including his creative and scholarly encounters with Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth and W. B. Yeats - the book gives fresh accounts of his engagements with contemporaries such as Delmore Schwartz and Randall Jarrell. It also includes essays that explore Berryman's poetic responses to Mozart and his influence on the contemporary Irish poet Paul Muldoon. Making extensive use of unpublished archival sources, personal reflections by friends and former students of the poet are accompanied by meditations on Berryman's importance for writers today by award-winning poets Paula Meehan and Henri Cole. Encompassing a wide range of scholarly perspectives and introducing several emerging voices in the field of Berryman studies, this volume affirms a major poet's significance and points to new directions for critical study and creative engagement with his work.

The poems in this collection capture the fantastic feeling of falling in love, all while keeping eyes on its lifecycles of crashing aftermaths, lingering regrets, guilt, and renewal. Peter Campion brings us to a series of scenes-on the damp patio, in the darkroom, and along the interstate-where we find familiar characters, lovers, and strangers. In the title poem, he takes us to the falls, where people and passions mix amid the sticky hanging mists: That charge of summer nights, that edge, like everyone's checking everyone out. Lingering a moment in the crowd gathered to watch the rush and crash and let the mist drift upward to our faces, I'm here: the future feels open again. Even alone tonight-still: open. Campion's poems introduce us to a range of people, all of whom are rendered with distinctiveness and intimacy. Their voices proliferate through the collection, with lyric folding into speech, autobiography becoming dramatic monologue, and casual storytelling taking on a ritualistic intensity. The poems in One Summer Evening at the Falls show how each character and each moment can be worthy of love and that this love both undoes us and makes us who we are. In narrative and lyric, in formal verse and free, Campion brings contemporary playfulness together with his classical talent to create this far-reaching and tender collection.

Letter from Ohio. The green so green it must be chemical. Faint drift of charcoal smoke. Rock radio. The pink azaleas thrusting at the blue. And all the same desires come crashing back: incredible X-ed out scenes and afterward the whoosh of traffic surf, our bodies bathed in the whole sweep of towers and freeways and meadows of blanket flowers. I want it all: heat puddle in the chest, moments like handfuls of honeycomb, split, dribbling...Enough. We've lived apart for weeks now and your voice cracks from the cell reception, hums and dips and breaks for seconds, as evening peaks to orange in the sycamores, and the need to see you stretches into the days that follow: stray lifetime spent in office rooms and parks and station halls as they fall to the curve of earth, the ocean. In El Dorado, Peter Campion explores what it feels like to live in America right now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Splicing cell-phone chatter with translations of ancient poems, jump-cutting from traditional to invented forms, and turning his high-res lens on everything from box stores to trout streams to airport lounges, Campion renders both personal and collective experience with capacious and subtle skill.

What do American poets mean when they talk about freedom? How can form help us understand questions about what shapes we want to give our poetic lives, and how much power we have to choose those shapes? For that matter, what do we even mean by we? In this collection of essays, Peter Campion gathers his thoughts on these questions and more to form an evolutionary history of the past century of American poetry. Through close readings of the great modernists, midcentury objectivists, late twentieth-century poets, his contemporaries, and more, Campion unearths an American poetic landscape that is subtler and more varied than most critics have allowed. He discovers commonalities among poets considered opposites, dramatizes how form and history are mutually entailing, and explores how the conventions of poetry, its inheritance, and its inventions sprang from the tensions of ordinary life. At its core, this is a book about poetic making, one that reveals how the best poets not only receive but understand and adapt what comes before them, reinterpreting the history of their art to create work that is, indeed, radical as reality.

What do American poets mean when they talk about freedom? How can form help us understand questions about what shapes we want to give our poetic lives, and how much power we have to choose those shapes? For that matter, what do we even mean by we? In this collection of essays, Peter Campion gathers his thoughts on these questions and more to form an evolutionary history of the past century of American poetry. Through close readings of the great modernists, midcentury objectivists, late twentieth-century poets, his contemporaries, and more, Campion unearths an American poetic landscape that is subtler and more varied than most critics have allowed. He discovers commonalities among poets considered opposites, dramatizes how form and history are mutually entailing, and explores how the conventions of poetry, its inheritance, and its inventions sprang from the tensions of ordinary life. At its core, this is a book about poetic making, one that reveals how the best poets not only receive but understand and adapt what comes before them, reinterpreting the history of their art to create work that is, indeed, radical as reality.

In his second collection of poems, Peter Campion writes about the struggle of making a life in America, about the urge 'to carve a space' for love and family from out of the vast sweep of modern life. Coursing between the political and personal with astonishing ease, Campion writes at one moment of his disturbing connection to the public political structure, symbolized by Robert McNamara (who makes a startling appearance in the title poem), then in the next of a haunting reverie beneath a magnolia tree, representing his impulse to escape the culture altogether. He moves through various forms just as effortlessly, as confident in rhymed quatrains as in slender, tensed free verse. In "The Lions", Campion achieves a fusion of narrative structure and lyric intensity that proves him to be one of the very best poets of his generation.

"Poem to Fire"
Fast transparency that explodes the fuel and air
in the cylinder and shuts the intake valves and thrusts
down on the piston so the crankshaft spins and spins
you cut through all material that blocks your way
so fast that driving now past rushes and billboards
this pull to her could be your own impersonal presence
cloaked in the day to day of the malls and condos
all those wired sensors keeping on guard for you
except you flicker even inside the wet wall
where papillary muscle makes that sweet pulsation
in whatever room she's moving through this moment
under the cotton and the cool smoothness tinted blue
In this debut collection, Peter Campion explores both the gaps and the connections between the self and others. Like the "night blooming jasmine leaving its warm trace," these poems arise out of the dark. A man awakens in a hotel room to find the neighboring voices merging with the anguished souls of his nightmare. A woman living alone beside the ocean hears the words of the dead echo in the crashing waves. But if these poems convey a feeling of an enduring emptiness, they also offer us the most vital intimacies. In one poem, two lovers traverse the industrial sweep of strip malls and office towers to arrive at their rendezvous. In another, the seemingly simple memory of a mother playing with her sons at a park bridges a chasm of pain and loss.
With great poise, keen insight, and formal skill, Campion moves between shared experience and interior life in the shifting textures of "Other People. "Whether writing in rhymed couplets or free verse, he matches a deep understanding of the poetic tradition with his own imaginativefeel for structure.
"The 'other people' of the title of this extraordinary book are fully alive in the life of its language; and so is the poet observing them, and observing himself, as one of them. The book is a sympathetic and unsentimental instrument of truth."--David Ferry

This book is for all those who teach general practice to medical students, both those based in academic departments and `service' general practitioners. It aims to combine the theoretical basis for teaching with practical material, and explores the extent to which general practice can and should take on teaching traditionally carried out in hospital (e.g. basic clinical skills training).