Choices

Any Good Poem

Richard Berlin, MD, shares the poem "Choices," by Tess Gallagher. Gallagher, the author of 11 books of poetry, lives and writes in her hometown of Port Angeles, Washington, and in her cottage in Co. Sligo, Ireland. She is the only American to have been honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award for her poetry from the Fondation of Rome, which she received in 2023. Her most recent poetry collection Is, Is Not, published by Graywolf press, won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award. Gallagher participated in BIRDMAN and SHORT CUTS, films centered on the work of her late husband Raymond Carver’s stories. Her own collection, The Man from Kinvara: Selected Stories, published in 2009, is the basis for film episodes under development. She was privileged to speak and read in celebration of Theodore Roethke at the Bloedel Reserve in September 2024. She currently serves as the inaugural Poet in Residence at the Field Arts and Events Hall in Port Angeles, Washington, and is a board member for The Friends of Roethke Foundation.

About her work, the poet Hayden Carruth wrote, “Gallagher’s poems, beyond their delicacy of language, have a delicacy of perception, and the capacity to see oneself objectively as another person doing the things one really does, with clear affection and natural concern.”

Dr Berlin has been writing a poem about his experience of being a doctor every month for the past 27 years in Psychiatric Times in a column called “Poetry of the Times.” He is instructor in psychiatry, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, Massachusetts. His latest book is Tender Fences.