Keywords choice, dedication, Poetry, poets, Tides Of Change

Mark Tochen is a retired pediatrician and medical administrator. He served two years as a general medical officer in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnamese-American War. A life-long writer, Mark has been published in medical journals, and his poetry and personal essays have been published in multiple print and online journals. His poetry has appeared in eleven Poets Choice anthologies, and his essays in two Free Spirit prose anthologies. In retirement he and his wife live along the Columbia River in Washington State.

In this powerful and moving collection of poems Mark Tochen serves as the recording angel of the “grim certainty” of his wife’s decline into Alzheimer’s. His beloved Helen is his “heart,” and his writing sustains him because he knows that his “sadness/ has been a blessing.” The tonal range of these poems as his wife’s “record keeper” is extraordinary—playful, poignant, witty, sad, aphoristic, celebratory, lamenting, joyful, plaintive, despairing, tender. He writes to honor Helen, “my lady of perfect pitch,” even as he mourns her inevitable “slipping away” and his “cupping of futile hands” against the inevitable loss of her memories. But he also knows that her “essence remains/ at [her] core.” In this marital journey of sadness, the poet and his wife “still laugh and joke every day.” And even if their “days are one long fall,” there are still “little glides of joy.” The poet grieves, but he also celebrates the radiance of their daily ilves in the growing darkness. Tides of Change is heart-breaking—and heart-warming.