Maximum Security Ward: Poem on the Point of Death

by Ramon Guthrie

`There can be no doubt of its cumulative power, its frequent brilliance. It is a major work within the span of recent years.' Wall Street Journal `Ramon Guthrie is a magnificent American poet in his seventies who has been overlooked . . . it is a deeply, heartbreakingly American book whose importance will become clearer and clearer as time passes.' The New York Times Book Review MOST of this extraordinary book was written while Ramon Guthrie was, as he thought, dying of cancer. The doctors gave him only a few weeks to live, but a month and fifty-seven transfusions later he was sent home, and soon after the American Institute of Arts and Letters presented him with an award. In this strange setting of the Intensive Care Ward he writes of the imprisonments, interrogations, torments, the gaolers and inquisitors, orderlies, nurses, doctors who take his ebbing life relentlessly in charge in what is a totalitarian regimen for all its affirmed benevolence. Throughout Guthrie maintains a bawdy, gusty, death-defying graveyard humour, with no illusions and no sentimentality. This masterly new book, in its energy, architecture, and probing of the human agony, is the crowning work of the long and distinguished career of this major poet/ RAMON GUTHRIE, a member of the French and Comparative Literature faculty at Dartmouth for many years, recently won the Marjorie Peabody Waite award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

Genres: Poetry

156 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Ramon Guthrie (January 14, 1896 – November 22, 1973) was a poet, novelist, essayist, critic, painter and professor of French and comparative literature. He published five collections of poetry, and two novels, translated three volumes of French nonfiction, edited two standard anthologies of French literature and published numerous reviews, essays and individual poems.