Woman-Stirred: The Underwater Hospital

Eugene David is a Berkeley writer, poet, and philosopher who has seven chapbooks of poetry. He is an advocate of Permaculture and sustainable strategies for a viable future for the earth. The back cover of his latest book, A Ground of Hope to Stand On, states: "For those who have already seen the urgency of returning to a culture of the earth and its care, these poems will hopefully serve as comfort and guidance." Click here for Eugene David's website.

The following is Eugene David's review of Jan Steckel's new chapbook, The Underwater Hospital.

In her first collection of poems, The Underwater Hospital, Jan Steckel relates her ancestral heritage traced back to her great-great grandfathers in Riga. And now in a distant land and a distant time she demonstrates that this heritage is alive and well in her own writing. We can be grateful she heeded her grandmother’s admonition:

“You must write!” and
“Don’t waste your life cooking, honey,
it’s all over in ten minutes.”

This initial book might be slim in the number of pages and poems, but it is packed with a power that makes it a weighty volume indeed. She tells her stories in finely detailed, but concise accounts of her life experiences, the gravity of which might have been shrugged off by souls with less sensitivity.

She demonstrates that her years of experience as a pediatrician did not succeed in making her jaded and numb as is so often the case. On the contrary, her intense awareness of the ironies of medicine and its sometimes inevitable failings is apparent from the outset with "Dios Le Bendiga", the opening piece, continues with "Three Little Sisters", and then comes to a head with "Swallowing Flies" in which she skillfully juxtaposes the absurdity of medical procedures gone mad with an old wise folktale, “There was an old lady who swallowed a fly. / I don’t know why…”

I have had the pleasure of hearing Jan read many of these poems at local readings, but seeing them in print has given me an enhanced sense of their depth and power. However, one poem I had not yet heard, "In the Bleak Midwinter", grabbed onto me with a vengeance and quickly became my favorite. In this powerful poem, she not only relates her alienation at the elitist Harvard University, but redeems herself from the experience with grace and precision:

All I remembered from my faraway home
blazed like canyon fires in the bleak midwinter,
bloomed like bougainvillea in snowbound Boston.
Lullabies sung by all my Mexican nannies drowned out
those harsh Yankee accents of Southie, Lowell and
Arlington,

Take that, frat boys! Masterful.

But the real genius in the poem is the actual ending which immediately follows those lines, and is prepped by the following prior and carefully crafted build-up:

The Titanic had collided with an iceberg and Harry Widener
couldn’t swim away, so we got Widener Library.
Tom Lamont of the Lamonts practiced in
the Lowell House catacombs…
If one of the ten-ton Russian bells splintered from its beam,
plummeted through the floors below it, and crushed Tom,
would we get another library?
November suicides frozen in the Charles River
waited for spring thaw to float them up among the sailboats.

And now back to the final 3 lines of the poem:

banishing from my teenage dreams
the ice on the Charles cracking
and the cold bells creaking.

If I had to pick, this poem would probably be in the top ten of any I have ever read. It’s right up there with Robert Hass’s masterpiece poem, "Interrupted Meditation".

This is beautiful and moving work. My only warning: be prepared to have your heart torn to pieces. But you will be rewarded with a new sense of compassion.