Anya Krugovoy Silver

Poetic Voice on Mortality

NY Times Obituary

By Richard Sandomir

August 11, 2018

Anya Krugovoy Silver, the poet who, after receiving a diagnosis of advanced breast cancer in 2004, wrote lyrical verse that gave readers an exquisite, intimate and sometimes angry account of her illness, died on Monday, August 6^th,  in Macon, Ga. She was 49.

Full Article.

Hear Anta Silver read her poem, The Dybbuk.

As health care professionals, we learn about disease in the classroom, mostly from clinicians and scientists.  Poets, like Anya Silver, introduce us to cancer’s humanistic reality.

Also read Williams Carlos Williams insightful lines from Asphodel, The Greeny Flower:

                Look at                              

what passes for the new.

You will not find it there but in

               despised poems.

                  It is difficult

to get the news from poems

               yet men die miserably every day

                        for lack

of what is found there.

               Hear me out

                 for I too am concerned

and every man

        who wants to die at peace in his bed

                       besides.