Necessary Speech

“It’s noon in beauty’s hell,” writes Michael Salcman in Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems. Salcman’s kissing the girls, he’s ogling the paintings, he’s open to Baltimore as much as Greece. As a poet/brain surgeon for whom “sake was light anesthesia,” he’s human and humorous. A generous guide to the Judaic world, as much internal as external via the family’s ordeal during the Holocaust, his “Coyotes in Connecticut,” the mellifluous “Lech Lecha” and the ambitious eight-part “Prague Suite” masterfully convey the rigors of survival. I raise a cup of that sake to Salcman, and bid you drink.

— Terese Svoboda, Author of Theatrix

Little is lost on Michael Salcman. Whatever he encounters seems to stick to him ready for retrieval—art, history, geography, biology, music and language. When he comes to write, they come along and make his poetry, as well as his life, rich, demanding, and multi-dimensional. You learn from a Salcman poem how things come together or fall apart. His selected poems highlight the best of his work, and the new poems are evidence that no artist’s work is ever completed and his or her best works may be the most recent.

— David Bergman, Emeritus professor of English, Towson University

Here it is: a treasure chest of poems, fresh as wonder, enduring as humanity In Necessary Speech: New and Selected Poems, Salcman speaks in a voice that is eloquent, compassionate, poignant, and deeply moving. I marvel at his range, from art to travel to history, with love as the source of it all. Once a neurosurgeon, Salcman writes with a rare combination of observation and intelligent feeling in his magnificent metamorphosis from saving lives to saving our souls – and our lives.

— Grace Schulman, Frost Medalist & Author, The Marble Bed

Brilliant, playful, rueful, profoundly grounded—a scholar of Erasmus and Sinatra, pinball and neurosurgery—Michael Salcman knows how tricky ideals become when you try to live them—whether you live for beauty or to repair the world or both. Salcman is a poet who has paid his dues, crafted a voice whose modulations are seamless: the profundity is natural as daylight. In Shades & Graces, his canvas is a lifeʼs entire arc. With this book, Salcman comes into his own.

— D. Nurkse, most recently author of Love in the Last Days: After Tristan and Iseult, and A Night in Brooklyn

A work of great rage, sorrow, and love, Michael Salcman’s majestic A Prague Spring tells an almost unbearable story that needs to be told over and over and never forgotten. Beginning with coldly matter-of-fact poems of family members lost to and escaping the Shoah, Salcman documents how his parents survived and met, and how he got along in Brooklyn, the glorious borough of his childhood, baseball's Dodgers, and the Brooklyn Bridge. Finally, he doubles back to visit the country of his birth. And in a series of stunning poems, a prose piece, and a final poem to his cousin Magda, Salcman ties together past and present, and gives us one more glimpse into the soul of a survivor, two really, his older cousin, and himself.

— Robert Cooperman, Author of In the Colorado Gold Fever Mountains, winner of the Colorado Book Award for Poetry

A Prague Spring is a near-epic book of history poems, interweaving the story of Prague with the Holocaust, family deaths and survivals, a book that stuns the reader with the enormities and sorrows of Time. Salcman uses the compression of narrative, meditative and lyric poetry to “bring you looted treasures: History’s twisted snakes.” Here we find a Holocaust survivor who is “a stick leaning on a stick, / an insect on a branch” as well as the backwards-running Jewish clock of Prague (“What city tells time like Prague?”) counterpoised with Salcman’s Brooklyn: “sweet / borough of my youth, heart and lung / of life.” Kafka and Salcman's ancestors haunt the Czech capital where “a pile of dust once pushed a cart of salt and spices / on a medieval street.” The poems revisit totalitarian defenestrations, slaughters and repressions as they recount, wonder and pray, all the time knowing “the brain is a savage beast, it eats when and what / no other organ eats….” At once autobiography, history, testimonial and memorial, A Prague Spring is a revolutionary collection of important and necessary poems, confidently written and—especially with Salcman’s tonal skills—always absorbing; it is further deepened by how perfectly Lynn Silverman’s dark photographs of Prague capture that ancient city’s shadows and ghosts.

— Dick Allen, Connecticut State Poet Laureate (2010-2015) and Author of This Shadowy Place, Present Vanishing, and Ode to the Cold War: Poems New and Selected

Poetry in Medicine, an anthology of poems about Doctors, Patients, Illness, and Healing, selected and edited by Michael Salcman, and recently published by Persea Books, (New York, 2015), contains more than 300 poems on medical subjects by history's finest poets from Ovid to the present, including Auden, Baudelaire, Berryman, Bishop, Blake, Dickinson, Eliot, Frost, Heaney, Hirsch, Larkin, Lux, Plath, Rilke, Ryan, Salcman, Sexton, Stevens, Whitman, Williams, Yeats and many others, as well as a scholarly Introduction and personal Preface by Salcman, brief biographies of the poets, and a thrilling Foreword by Michael Collier.

A remarkable volume of poems about medicine, by writers ranging from Shakespeare to Ogden Nash to Lucille Clifton—some tragic, some funny but all worthy of a penetrating read. This book should be of interest to all thoughtful readers, among them physicians, patients and anyone associated with (or interested in) the medical professions.

— Solomon H. Snyder, M.D., Distinguished Service Professor of Neuroscience, Johns Hopkins Medical School, recipient of the Lasker Prize in Medicine and the National Medal of Science

Upon its debut, Poetry in Medicine received a very strong review by Donna Seaman at Booklist who called it "this unique, unnerving, and moving anthology...arranged within 14 unflinching clinical thematic categories...Primarily about physical illness, these imaginative, frank, witty, transcendent, and elegiac poems articulate the full range of emotions and mental aberrations sickness arouses. Who better to write about the mysteries of the body and the mind under stress than ever-vigilant, temperature-taking, empathic poets?" And Amazon listed it as the No.1 new Poetry Anthology and the No.1 new book in the Physician & Patient and Doctor-Patient Relations categories.

Books by Michael Salcman

Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems

Shades & Graces

A Prague Spring, Before & After

Poetry in Medicine

The Enemy of Good is Better

The Clock Made of Confetti