Meditations in an Anatomy Laboratory and Other Poems

Irving I. Edgar

I am, to say the least, not a big believer in copyright. In fact, I despise the very notion. But I have found one minor point of usefulness in its favor. One assumes, when one peruses the catalog of "other books published by this press" on the back of a book, that the quality of other books published by said press will be at least of a rough equivalent to the other books in the catalog; for a small press, anyway. So when you look at a Philosophical Press roster and see names like Sartre, Schweitzer, Voltaire, Gide, Kant, and Bacon, and see that the book you happen to be holding is by someone you've never heard of before... well, one does tend to get excited. Ah, but here's the catch; all the good stuff listed is under public domain, and can be printed by, well, anyone with a printer. (Or read, of course, at Project Gutenberg, but that didn't exist in 1979.) And having now read Irving I. Edgar's *Meditations in an Anatomy Laboratory and Other Poems*, I can say with some authority that to put Edgar in the same class as any of the folks above is at best the height of folly, at worst sacreligious.

Edgar's poetry is the sort of painful teen-angst crap written by lovelorn high schoolers pining after characters in Anne Rice potboilers. Granted, Edgar (a doctor of some note, one assumes from the CV on the back flap) has a little more life experience than your average high school goth, but it certainly didn't translate into an ability to write better poetry. In fact, calling it poetry at all is often going too far.

"See now!
Crowds of students are dipping their hands
into greasy cadavers, and gangrene wounds;
and these hands and fingers
are dripping and reeking of death.
These hands and fingers they place
upon the abdomen and birth canals--...
And shrieks of pain pass from their lips..."
(--"A Semmelweis Phantasy")

It could be worse. I could have given you the stanza before that one, but, dear reader, I feared for your sanity. Oh, and I should mention the ellipses there are [sic].

This is a deeply, deeply bad book. Not only is the poetry (or whatever you'd like to call it) poorly constructed in the extreme, but it really has nothing of any worth to say whatsoever. Edgar takes what is, admittedly, an intriguing setting in which to speculate on the greater truths of life, the universe, and everything, and comes up with some of the most boringly conservative answers one would expect. Edgar comes off here as a much more morbid version of Helen Steiner Rice who never learned to use rhyme. Come to think of it, For Miz Rice, that would have been a marked improvement. But here, it's just horrid.