Landscape with Human Figure

by Rafael Campo

In Landscape with Human Figure, his fourth and most compelling collection of poetry, Rafael Campo confirms his status as one of America’s most important poets. Like his predecessor William Carlos Williams, who was also a physician, Campo plumbs the depths of our capacity for empathy. Campo writes stunning, candid poems from outside the academy, poems that arise with equal beauty from a bleak Boston tenement or a moonlit Spanish plaza, poems that remain unafraid to explore and to celebrate his identity as a doctor and Cuban American gay man. Yet no matter what their unexpected and inspired sources, Campo’s poems insistently remind us of the necessity of poetry itself in our increasingly fractured society; his writing brings us together—just as did the incantations of humankind’s earliest healers—into the warm circle of community and connectedness. In this heart-wrenching, haunting, and ultimately humane work, Rafael Campo has painted as if in blood and breath a gorgeously complex world, in which every one of us can be found.

Genres: Poetry, LGBT

104 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Dr. Rafael Campo, MD (Harvard Medical School, 1992; M.A., English, Amherst College; B.S., neuroscience, Amherst College), is a poet and doctor of internal medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He is also on the faculty of Lesley University's Creative Writing MFA Program.

His first collection of poems, The Other Man Was Me: A Voyage to the New World, won the National Poetry Series Open Competition in 1993. What the Body Told (1996) won a Lambda Literary Award, and Diva was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1999. The Poetry of Healing (1996) also received a Lambda Literary Award for Memoir.

Campo is a PEN Center West Literary Award finalist and a recipient of the National Hispanic Academy of Arts and Sciences Annual Achievement Award. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Echoing Green Foundation. He frequently lectures widely and gives seminars and workshops relating to medicine, literary writing, and culture.

Reviews

[Duke Press]

“Rafael Campo blends several selves into his persona as a poet—Cuban-American, openly gay man, physician, AIDS healer, teacher. Each facet of his life is brilliantly yet formally depicted in his fourth collection, Landscape with Human Figure . . . . Each rereading will yield new wisdom, heart, and insight—great poems, really, reveal their truths with inspired reluctance. Campo is among his generation’s best poets . . . .”--Richard Labonte, The Front Page

“[A] pleasant and accessible fourth collection of poetry . . . . [T]he gentle, regular rhythms of [Campo’s] poems give them a sense of quiet control. . . . Contemplative, hopeful, and heartfelt. . . .”--Chelsea Johnson, Out

“[Campo’s] contemporary verses bristle with immediacy. . . . The poems explore the contradictions of contemporary culture, seeking to define the place of art in ‘the shrinking world.’ ”--David Caplan, The Columbus Dispatch

"[Campo’s] fourth and most compelling collection, a candidate for another award. In today’s hustle and bustle, this collection of poems is highly recommended to take your mind off of yourself and learn how others might react to life and death, laughter and sorrow, and love and hate. A must book for all academic and public libraries, as well as the personal collections who truly appreciate great poets."--H. Robert Malinowsky, AIDS Book Review Journal

[Malachi]

I'm skipping around in this one, but all of his work is honest and truth-filled.

[Jen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This volume of poetry focuses on relationships, both romantic and familial, as well as the poet's Cuban roots. I was hoping for more from his position as a physician. Though he doesn't shy away from including his experiences as a physician and how it shapes his understanding of love and compassion, it's definitely not a focus of this collection.

He has divided the book into 5 sections. It was sections IV and V that I enjoyed the most because he explores a variety of forms in them. It was easy to admire his facility with off/slant rhyme and I appreciate when poets try their hand at older forms. While I would call his forays into form successful, none of them won my heart over.

I think I'm entering a phase in my poetry reading where I want to be able to relate to the subject matter of a poem and that didn't happen a lot in this volume. That said, the only poem I marked as one I particularly enjoyed was "On the Virtues of Not Shaving," which subject matter is on the far outside of what I can't relate to but still appealed to me.

[Janée Baugher · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was hoping to find science-influence diction in this collection by a scientist. Alas...Though, if you're interested in reading AIDS-related poetry, read these poems.