Poetry 

Many Things To Tell You
by Seniors Living in Nursing Homes
Compiled by Dr. Tom Heinzen
144 Pages                     
Price: $10
ISBN 1-885778-14-7

    The poems in “Many Things to Tell You” expresses the mental plight of many seniors living in nursing homes.  As they approach their last days, they surely have a lot to say to society! These are their voices, their thoughts and frustrations, coined into moving poetry... 

From the introduction:
Jung's collective unconscious has found a voice! Psychologist Tom Heinzen has produced an unusual collection of poems and reflections by people living in nursing homes.

The wisdom seeping through these words is an unconscious wisdom; even the authors are frequently unaware of the startling words they have spoken! For example, the title poem reads "Please don't let time pass/ Until you come again/ Because I have Many Things to Tell You/ That I don't remember." Nevertheless, these nursing home residents are speaking for the rest of us.

Anyone who has passed through the doors of a nursing home will attest to the visible depression in the faces of forlorn residents loudly pleading to go home. Yet these most unlikely sources of creativity have produced a convincing beauty that is as gripping as any book of conventional poetry -- and far more compelling than most. Pulitzer Prize winning author Harper Lee (To Kill a Mocking Bird) broke her long public silence to give this surprising book a vote of confidence. It is just that startling a collection.

Organized into categories which Heinzen asserts describe the nursing home experience, Many Things to Tell You, disrupts our conventional stereotypes and offers convincing evidence for a wisdom that is oddly pleasurable while frighteningly real. It is a voice crying out of the wilderness of very old age. And that is a wilderness through which almost every man and woman from every culture must someday pass.

Read Many Things to Tell You and you will see yourself many years from now.

Comments: Grow old ???