The Medicine Wheel turns through each of the eight sections in this collection with the poems gathered into each part touching on many subjects: nature poems running through the seasons personality portraits social concerns – such as the plight of refugees the treatment of animals and persecution leading one to consider the price of being true to one’s conscience. History is touched on in Part 5 with the Cathars and the fall of Montsegur remembered but through it all one gets a sense that the Wheel is turning through good and ill. The final turn comes at the very end with Rembrandt – in his painting of the two companions who with Christ at Emmaus sit down for a meal at the end of the day – finding perhaps ‘the truth within the symbol’ leading one to ask did the painter indeed find the real good medicine what ‘he had been seeking / all his days’?
