The Anatomy Theater: Poems

by Meyer, Nadine Sabra

• ISBN13: 9780061122170
• ISBN10: 0061122173
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-08-09
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

An exciting first collection of poetry from an emerging talent, Nadine Meyer's The Anatomy Theater was a winner of the 2005 National Poetry Series Open Competition, selected by esteemed poet John Koethe. For over twenty years, the National Poetry Series has discovered many new and emerging voices and has been instrumental in launching the careers of poets and writers such as Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Denis Johnson, Cole Swensen, Thylias Moss, Mark Levine, and Dionisio Martinez.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Effigy of John Donne Wrapped in His Death Shroud	xiii
I.
The Flayed Man	3	(2)
The Anatomy Theater	5	(2)
Dissection Prayers	7	(3)
The Cadaver	10	(2)
Flap Anatomy	12	(2)
Apollo and Marsyas	14	(3)
The Artist at the Dissection	17	(6)
II.
Seasonal Incantation	23	(10)
The Paper House	33	(8)
III.
At the Cirque Fernando: The Ringmaster	41	(2)
The Unfinished Bride	43	(2)
The Artist at His Canvas	45	(1)
At the Salon of 1865	46	(2)
Miss La La at the Circus	48	(2)
The Gorgons	50	(2)
Hygieia	52	(3)
Dancing at the Moulin Rouge	55	(8)
IV.
Man in a Field of Sunflowers	63	(3)
For Those Floating Above Vitebsk	66	(11)
John Donne on His Deathbed	77	(3)
Notes	80

Excerpts

The Anatomy Theater
Poems

The Flayed Man

after Juan de Valverde’s 1560 anatomy text, Anatomia del corpo umano

He has flayed himself for our inspection, pressed his knife through the dermis of his large right toe, run its tip along the base of his foot, splitting left from right, up the back of his calf and thigh, carefully, the way a woman runs the seam of her stockings up the midline of each leg, and slipped his muscled and gelatinous body from its casing. As one slices the skin from an apple in a long spiraling similitude, he has kept, where possible, his ghostly likeness intact. In one hand he holds it out to us, a testament to what he’s done, and in the other he holds the knife. Martyr for science, he stands, each muscle overdeveloped, numbered for the anatomist’s study as if it were possible to slit this human casing, slip from one’s integument and go on living in the delicate inner flesh. What then is beauty when the skin has been shucked? A marbling of muscle and fat, the patterning of veins and arteries, tenderness of disease? Complicit, a participant in his own dissection, the Flayed Man brandishes his life: without regard for his soul, he offers this oblation, his own decorticated corpus, to Medicine and Anatomy. For over a thousand years, for fear that to dissect the body impedes the soul’s chrysalis, its incorporeal unfurling, the study of anatomy had virtually stopped, but now the Flayed Man, his jaunty disregard, his terrible theatrical privation, the outstretched offering of his own skin as if to say, all this, I have done for you.

The Anatomy Theater
Poems. Copyright © by Nadine Meyer. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Excerpted from The Anatomy Theater: Poems by Nadine Sabra Meyer
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.