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House Calls With William Carlos Williams, MD | 
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| Author: Robert Coles
Creators: William Carlos Williams, Thomas Roma
Publisher: powerHouse Books
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
Buy New: $18.78
You Save: $11.17 (37%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 315840
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 106
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 6.5 x 0.5
ISBN: 1576874753
Dewey Decimal Number: 770
EAN: 9781576874752
ASIN: 1576874753
Publication Date: September 2008
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Product Description
William Carlos Williams made his mark on the world as a legendary modernist poet, but he filled an equally significant role on a local level in his native New Jerseyas a doctor. Over the first half of the twentieth century, Williams built a successful practice as a pediatrician and OB-GYN, and while some of his patients made the journey to his office in the affluent town of Rutherford, many more were privileged with house calls. House Calls with William Carlos Williams, MD is a collaborative effort by child psychiatrist Robert Coles and photographer Thomas Roma to retrace Dr. Williams rounds, which included patients from Rutherford all the way north to Paterson. Coles, an early fan of the doctors literary work, befriended Williams as a young man, and in the early 50s was invited to come along on many of these outings; his experiences are recounted here in engaging first-person anecdotes. Roma was given access to the patients addresses in 2001, and plotted a route he would travel with his camera over the course of the next five years; his quiet, contemplative photographs of the streets Dr. Williams walked provide a striking visual counterpoint to Coles text. Selections of Williams poetry are reproduced throughout, including excerpts from his five-part epic, Paterson. The result is an immersive experience, in which the reader may travel side-by-side with Williams, listening and learning from the famed poet, doctor, and mentor.
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| Customer Reviews:
"I have eaten the plums" November 28, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
William Carlos Williams is known for his huge contribution to American literature during the first half of the twentieth century. He was friend, rival, or mentor to some of the most influential modernist and post-modernist poets of the era. He was also a pediatrician with a practice in and around Paterson, New Jersey for most of the same half-century.
Williams the doctor is the subject of House Calls With William Carlos Williams, MD. In an unusual collaboration, photographer Thomas Roma captured the streets where Williams had made his trademark house calls, and physician Robert Coles contributed the text from his memories of "rounding" with Williams as a medical student.
The linking principle between the photos and text is Williams's own practice of taking in the image and moving from there to the understanding. According to Coles, Williams "connected hearing and thinking to close, attentive watching, all part of the doctor's job." Coles quotes Williams on artists: "They made their house calls on us, got us to stop, look, consider -- the artist become a learner, a teacher, just as a house-calling doctor takes something in through his senses, then comes up with his 'findings.'"
Williams, steeped in urban America, was strongly socialist in his politics, and his doctoring was guided by the need to see patients in their social context. His role as observer is strongly stated in this book -- sometimes the sympathetic observer, sometimes passionate. Coles quotes Williams watching a group of children: "They never did, those big shots in Washington, during the 1930's, ask a lot of kiddos like those ... to talk about what's there, waiting to be heard, seen, handed over to others ... Where was the urban version of the FSA, aiming its sights at ordinary city kids? I guess we've gotten lost a little."
The reference to the Farm Security Administration's photo collection can't be accidental. The FSA collection is a definitive photographic record of rural and small-town life between the Depression and WWII, and Thomas Roma's bleak black-and-white cityscapes, taken in 2006 and 2007 for HOUSE CALLS, have the same feel. Harsh shadows, derelict buildings, drooping utility wires, fire escapes, trees blossoming against chain link fences -- they speak as strongly as the text. Both echo Williams's interest in structures, in juxtapositions, in the life of the city streets that gives modern America its shape and voice.
This small book (107 pages) is half text and half photos, with a few of Williams's poems incorporated; it's impossible, after all, to separate the doctor from the poet. Elusive, thought-provoking, deceptively simple, HOUSE CALLS begs to be read and then read again; like Williams's poetry, the structure and imagery convey as much as the words. Recommended for anyone interested in the poet, or in photography or mid-century urban American life. Five stars for a gift that keeps on giving.
Linda Bulger, 2008
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