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’?
