Böcker av Greg Stidham

Iced tea, like poetry, looks deceptively easy to make. The ingredients are simple, but there is a fine balance between bitterness and sweetness. And that simplicity and balance takes time, patience, and care. The same holds true for Greg Stidham's refreshing, full-bodied poetic debut. Like the poet Ted Kooser, Stidham's poems are straightforward and direct, praising common objects, and ordinary experiences. Here is a poet who trusts and celebrates the world, with all of its surprises and predictability, its sorrow, its joy. The clarity and precision of his remarkable poems help reveal, and deepen, the mysteries of the everyday. Jason Heroux, third poet laureate of Kingston, Ontario; author of 'Survivors of the Hive.' Some poets convey great warmth and tenderness in their poems, while others present a steely, hard-bitten assessment of the world, but it is rare to find both these qualities in one voice, as readers encounter in the poetry of Greg Stidham. Iced Tea Poetry offers images distilled and crafted in the forge of lived experience, from a life spent doctoring critically ill children, and the same life enriched by embracing even the smallest moments of joy with gratitude and recognition. As in the work of his direct predecessors, Ted Kooser and Wendell Berry, Stidham takes in the landscapes and people around him with care but without sentimentality, as in the unforgettable "Crossing the Plains," where a family's long ago loss of child is remembered against the backdrop of an image, "And ahead, the vast goldness of wheat/ radiates endlessly toward the sun/ poised on the horizon's lip." Late in his career, our most eminent literary critic Harold Bloom asked an enduring question: "Where shall wisdom be found?" I feel certain in responding that one place where wisdom still can be found is in the poetry of Greg Stidham. - Jesse Graves, Professor and Poet-in-Residence at East Tennessee State University, author of 'Merciful Days and Said-Songs: Essays on Poetry and Place'.

An introspective look at how the experiences of an intensive care unit physician helped shape his optimistic worldview during a thirty-two-year medical career. In Blessings and Sudden Intimacies: Musings of a Pediatric Intensivist, Dr. Greg Stidham entertains, inspires, and expresses gratitude for the experiences that have enriched his life. Not only does he reveal many of the extraordinary things he's experienced, but he also opens a way for us to view our own lives as a series of blessings. Encounters with critically ill and dying children and their parents, present the poignant "sudden intimacies" of the book. The "blessings" refer to the young patients, families and healthcare personnel who touched him. Throughout, he tells of trying to ease, understand and make sense of the suffering of his young patients and their families. But he also balances the serious narrative with funny stories, letting us in on the sort of silly humor that helps a medical staff get through its day. The book doesn't just cover Dr. Stidham's professional life. Now retired, he intertwines stories from his personal life, too, looking at how experiences at home and work have shaped and influenced each other, and him. He covers topics such as friendships, marriage, birth of children and grandchildren, relocations, health issues, vacations, and travel. Through it all, the Cleveland native and Kingston, Ontario, resident maintains an optimistic mindset that gave him the empathy and strength needed to sustain a long medical career, most of which was spent at the University of Tennessee Health Sciences Center and LeBonheur Children's Medical Center in Memphis. An accomplished writer, Stidham has published a memoir, numerous pieces of short fiction, and creative nonfiction. But his real passion is writing poetry. Blessings and Sudden Intimacies presents a series of experiences that take readers on a ride along with Dr. Stidham as he comforts, cares, grieves, and comes to understand how one can find blessings in some of life's most difficult times. The stories are told in direct, clear language that brings his patients and their struggles to life in vivid fashion, which helps us find meaning, as he has, in the smallest, most fleeting encounter.