"Warning: The poems in The Seven-Year Night are strong medicine and likely to be habit forming.

Wilk’s poems pack an emotional wallop that even the best TV medical dramas can only hope to achieve.

Like a high-resolution MRI scan revealing the heretofore unseen (and sometimes, unwanted) Wilk penetrates the surface of life—and death—revealing some of the very marrow of our amazingly beautiful, confounding and heartbreaking existence.”

Steve Kissing, Running from the Devil and Survival of the Fittest

"... a fascinating collection by a working physician who, in the mold of William Carlos Williams, is also a wonderful poet. It has been said that when poetry is stripped down to its essentials, only two themes remain, love and death. This collection deals with both of these themes in an intimate way rarely encountered. Reading these poems, we meet a physician who loves his patients and is there for them at some of the most difficult times of their lives, and a poet who can write about his and their humanity in a way that is both moving and profound. These poems have given me a stronger sense of what it means to be human than anything I have read in a very long time. Thank you, Dr. Wilk.”

IF Miller, Moonburn

Dr. Wilk’s poetry nearly always has a medical theme , often graphically so, but he freely and successfully brings his own life into his work. The best poem in the book, indeed one of the better poems I’ve read in some time, Hands at Forty, compares his hands to those of his father, also an obstetrician:

Men often rediscover at forty,
deep in mirrors while shaving,
their fathers’faces.
But I see in the warm amnion
of sinks, soap and running water
my father’s hands.

But his father’s hands, on which his father lavished so much care, controlled far more than the outcome of deliveries or hysterectomies:

…But every month and a half,
he would carefully file his nails
into unscratching, semi-lunar curves
to begin a process of nightly ablutions,
slathering on lotions and emollients,
sleeping with sweat socks over his hands
for a week or so, until by Saturday
they were smooth and ready.
And then he would drive out
of state to spend the weekend
with his mistress.

The spectrum of the experiences recorded by Dr. Wilk ranges from his own mirror to medical school auditoriums to Emergency and Operating Room and finally the medical office. At all times Dr. Wilk always seeks to identify the human element (somewhere between carbon and gold on the Periodic Table) and spotlight it. These are the concluding lines from Lost, a poem about a man he finds wandering in the hospital

We shuffled down the hall toward ICU,
making a right, another right, a left
another right, then through the double doors—
where two policemen intercepted us.

“His daughter made a missing person call.
His wife is dead. We’ve found him here before.”

“Is this the ICU? I’m here to see
Susan P. Moynihan. She’s had a stroke.
I married her in 1943,
right out of high school, just before I joined
the navy. I’d be lost without my Sue.”

The great danger that medical professionals, and especially doctors, with our nimbus of self-importance, face in writing about our medical experiences is melodrama. Nearly everyone does it. These are the concluding lines from a poem on a patient with severe anorexia:

Fluorescent lights, unmoving in their coffins
in the ceiling, whisper light across the dust
bowl of her belly, casting angular
and ominous shadows of trochanters
and tubercles from the bones she’ll leave behind

I offer not as a criticism but an observation we all can learn from. This is a fine book of poems written by a practicing physician, which everyone interested in medical poetry will want to own.

William Rector, Poetry Editor, Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine Published: January 20, 2010