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Bob Jacob was born in Brooklyn, New York. He developed
a love of poetry from his father who wrote poems
about family love. In the 1980s, Bob and his wife, Betty,
invited poets to stay at their Massachusetts inn and also
ran a poetry reading series featuring many well-known
poets. In the mid-1990s, Bob and Betty moved to
Connecticut. There he founded VERSEtility BOOKS, selling
signed copies of famous poets' books and giving most
of the profits to the poets. Bob is a poet who started writing
32 years ago.
In the 1990s he began reading poetry to cancer support
groups, and today he continues volunteering his time at the Connecticut Hospice
Hospital in Brantford and other hospitals. He also visits homebound patients. He composes
his poems after hearing patients' stories. These poems are included in
Perspectives, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
He is donating the proceeds of this book to the Connecticut Hospice. Noteworthy to
mention is that Bob Jacob has created an index of the poems that he sends on a regular
basis to people who request them. Quite a service! He makes his large collection
available to churches, chaplains, and to cancer patients.
An impressive landscape painting of the Connecticut Hospice on the cover invites us to
open this book. What we find inside is a unique and gratifying experience. The honesty
and warmth of these poems conveys the author's compassion for the patients in palliative
care. He even encourages these people to create and share their own poems, giving
them a chance to live out their last days with joy and satisfaction. For example:
Catherine lies quietly
a former grade school teacher
with a beautiful smile,
dark, brown eyes, soft voice.
She sighs after each poem,
then recites some back to me. (p. 23)
Although the book is written from a Christian point of view, there is a universal message
of faith in a higher power whether it is Jesus, or the God of other religions. The
words of John Fox in Jacob's poem, Cradled Love, express this universality:
The greatest current of love
rushes forward in the choice
to make a cradle of the body. (p. 49)
Quotes throughout the book from other poets and writers epitomize its poignant message of
love: We are each of us angels with only one wing. And we can only fly embracing each
other. — Luciano De Creschenzo (p. 32)
The author's flair for treating hospice patients as though they were healthy is a testament to
his own “joie de vivre.” He values people who are struggling with terminal illness. They teach
him life lessons. Although dying is a depressing topic, the people he reads to are far from
gloomy. In fact, we have some good, honest laughs through his poems. Special Lady is about
a woman of 89 who seems at ease with death and looks forward to seeing family and friends
who died before her. She says:
“I hope I have a good seat,”
implying heaven is a theatre
with preferred seating for those
waiting to greet newcomers. (p. 82)
And, of course, we laugh at Jacob's famous lines that are quoted in some of the other poems:
“If a man speaks in the forest and there’s no woman to hear him, is he still wrong?”
She answers with an emphatic “YES.” (p. 83).
The poem that stands out for me is: IDT Meeting. This poem demonstrates Bob's flair for personalizing
the hospice experience. It starts with:
Picture yourself surrounded
by people who care about you.
Some you know, some you don’t.
Picture them discussing you,
Your family, your pain,
drugs to help alleviate it. (pp. 21-22)
These verses bring back personal memories of when I was flat on my back several years
ago. The caring warmth and empathy of my family and friends helped me to recover more
quickly.
Then talking about volunteers:
Volunteers, a ray of light …
young and old
through song and words, …
giving time and hearts
to souls seeking comfort. (p. 20)
With each passing year, I attend funerals of my friends and family, some younger than I
am, who have died of cancer. Four years ago, I played soulful Yiddish folk songs on my
guitar along with a clarinettist to patients in palliative care at a hospital in Montreal. It
was a heart-rending experience. The patients were too sick to leave their beds. I was
happy when I heard that our music soothed them.
Since then, I have learned to appreciate every moment, every bird, every tree and
every flower. There is a Hebrew prayer that Jews recite every morning upon awakening:
Thank you God for giving us another day.
Order Perspectives: Hospice Poems by Bob Jacob from Antrim House, P.O. Box 111,
Tariffville, CT 06081; Check out Antrim House Books: Catalog: Perspective
by Bob Jacob for details. All proceeds will benefit The Connecticut Hospice.
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