Tired of the pace and noise of life near London and longing for a better place to raise their young children, Mary J. MacLeod and her husband encountered their dream while vacationing on a remote island in the Scottish Hebrides. Enthralled by its windswept beauty, they soon were the proud owners of a near-derelict croft house—a farmer’s stone cottage—on “a small acre” of land. Mary assumed duties as the island’s district nurse. Call the Nurse is her account of the enchanted years she and her family spent there, coming to know its folk as both patients and friends. In anecdotes that are by turns funny, sad, moving, and tragic, she recalls them all, the crofters and their laird, the boatmen and tradesmen, young lovers and forbidding churchmen. Against the old-fashioned island culture and the grandeur of mountain and sea unfold indelible stories: a young woman carried through snow for airlift to the hospital; a rescue by boat; the marriage of a gentle giant and the island beauty; a ghostly encounter; the shocking discovery of a woman in chains; the flames of a heather fire at night; an unexploded bomb from World War II; and the joyful, tipsy celebration of a ceilidh. Gaelic fortitude meets a nurse’s compassion in these wonderful true stories from rural Scotland.

A remarkable Pocket Poets anthology of poems from around the world and across the centuries about illness and healing, both physical and spiritual. From ancient Greece and Rome up to the present moment, poets have responded with sensitivity and insight to the troubles of the human body and mind. Poems of Healing gathers a treasury of such poems, tracing the many possible journeys of physical and spiritual illness, injury, and recovery, from John Donne’s “Hymne to God My God, In My Sicknesse” and Emily Dickinson’s “The Soul has Bandaged moments” to Eavan Boland’s “Anorexic,” from W.H. Auden’s “Miss Gee” to Lucille Clifton’s “Cancer,” and from D.H. Lawrence’s “The Ship of Death” to Rafael Campo’s “Antidote” and Seamus Heaney’s “Miracle.” Here are poems from around the world, by Sappho, Milton, Baudelaire, Longfellow, Cavafy, and Omar Khayyam; by Stevens, Lowell, and Plath; by Zbigniew Herbert, Louise Bogan, Yehuda Amichai, Mark Strand, and Natalia Toledo. Messages of hope in the midst of pain—in such moving poems as Adam Zagajewski’s “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” George Herbert’s “The Flower,” Wisława Szymborska’s “The End and the Beginning,” Gwendolyn Brooks’ “when you have forgotten Sunday: the love story” and Stevie Smith’s “Away, Melancholy”—make this the perfect gift to accompany anyone on a journey of healing. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

Within most disciplines there are those who are recognized by their colleagues as being exceptionally competent practitioners. These people are sometimes called "expert," "unusually competent," or "extraordinary." Their commonality is that they do their work in a remarkable way and their actions and interpersonal interactions are regarded by others as highly successful. This book is based on a recent study of the beliefs, actions, and interactions of a group of unusually competent oncology nurses. These are nurses their peers would choose to have care for them if they were diagnosed with cancer. The weaving together of the nurses’ narratives and comments, field notes, and poetry, give a very personal and unique perspective on nursing that leaves the reader with a greater understanding of the experience and rewards of caring for others.

Poetic Inquiry: Vibrant Voices in the Social Sciences, co-edited by Monica Prendergast, Carl Leggo and Pauline Sameshima, features many of the foremost scholars working worldwide in aesthetic ways through poetry.

The original Bengali novel Shesher Kavita (lit. Last Poem) was published in 1929. The author draws an amusing picture of an ultra-modern Bengali intellectual whose Oxford education, while giving him a superiority complex, has induced in him a craze for conscious originality which results in a deliberate and frivolous contrariness to all accepted opinion and convention. His aggressive self-complacence, however, receives a shock when as the result of an accidental meeting he falls in love with, and wins in return the heart of, a quite different product of modern culture – a highly educated girl of fine sensibility and deep feelings. This love being more or less genuine and different from his previous experience of coquetry, releases his own submerged depth of sincerity, which he finds hard to adjust to the habits of sophistry and pose, practised so long. In the process he manages to strike a new romantic attitude. The struggle makes of him a curiously pathetic figure – one who is being worked against his grain. The tragedy is understood by the girl, who releases him from his troth and disappears from his life. The last poem which she addresses to her lover gives evidence of the depth of feeling of which she was capable.