Indigenous health: reaching beyond rhetoric

A 12-YEAR-OLD GIRL is playing the violin. The poet asks if she hears the tunes in her head. “No”, she replies, “My fingers know the way, and I follow them”. It’s a measure of how much meaning Richard Bronson’s poems can sustain that this glorious, insouciant piece of “found poetry” (the girl presumably said just this) reads as a brief image of the link between body and mind, the physical and the inspirational. Bronson is an endocrinologist, and this is his first collection of poetry. Some of his work draws directly and successfully on his medical experiences, but most does not. There is a cool intelligence and compassion throughout which one can think of as exemplifying the ideal doctor, but little which fits easily with lazier notions of “medical humanities”. Rather, the driving force is an awareness of cultural heritage. Music and literature are everywhere. The girl, the poet, his late father are all musical, and we learn that Bronson’s library includes Rilke’s magnificent (and fiercely difficult) Duino Elegies and the like. Indeed, two poems are addressed to Hypatia, murdered by Christian fanatics in 5th century Alexandria and one of the first women of learning whose name we know. The destruction of a civilisation which this event symbolises is at the heart of some bleak meditations for a post 9/11 world: The world has come to this no heat, no water, no food, but boxes of books in my basement.