Tender Fences

Richard M. Berlin's fifth collection of poems, TENDER FENCES, spans the arc of the poet's career as a doctor and psychiatrist. Beginning with his family's hopes and expectations, and his own dream to become a doctor, Berlin explores the challenges of medical and psychiatric training, his years of practice, and the deep rewards that grow from healing relationships structured by a "tender fence" which provides the necessary boundaries for closeness and distance. Berlin's voice touches on themes of intimacy, love, the doctor-patient relationship, the drama of psychotherapy, a doctor's sense of responsibility, transience, aging, and the satisfactions that come from a healer's life. With these poems, Richard M. Berlin confirms that medical and psychiatric practice fit well with Pablo Neruda's description of poetry as, "Entrance into the depth of things in a headlong act of love."
"A twenty first century William Carlos Williams."--Booklist
"Clear, honest, direct, and--what doctors usually can't afford to be--vulnerable, Richard M. Berlin's poems make me feel good about the health of American medicine and poetry."--Charles Harper Webb
"Berlin's writing sheds all doctrines and poses. His poetry is about the revelation that emerges at the edge between our knowledge of the world provided to us by science or maturation, and the chaotic understructure that throws up in front of us surprises that are both wanted and unwanted."--Paul R. Fleishman, MD
Poetry.