For more than a month, many have watched – with equal parts fascination and horror – the psychodrama that is the case of Terry Schiavo. Ms. Schiavo lies in a vegetative state in a Pinellas County, Fla., nursing home while her husband, her parents, her newly appointed guardian, the courts, the legislature and the governor of Florida fight over who should decide whether she is kept alive or allowed to die.

Ms. Schiavo's brain-damaged condition is a tragedy that has brought her family together in a vise-grip of distrust, anger, rejection and denial. In less dramatic fashion, however, patients and their families daily confront the reality of end-of-life decision-making. Not surprisingly, some of them – as well as their physicians and nurses – have turned to writing or reading poetry for comfort, guidance or perspective, or to share their losses.

Early in Amy Gerstler's Medicine (Penguin USA, $15.95 paperback), there is a poem ("To a Young Woman in a Coma") that speaks to the grief of Terry Schiavo's family:

You haven't gulped down your allotted portion
of joy yet, so you must wake up. Recover ...
Come up from the basement. Climb those damp
plank stairs and reenter the squinty glare
of consciousness. Grip the rickety handrail.
If words could make the wish come true, surely these plaintive lines would cure:
. . . So wiggle your toes. Groan.
Open those gunky eyes. You need to grow older,
have those babies, try to describe what
the other side was like, go ice skating.

The one left mourns

Eventually, it seems, all good poets pay a visit to Shakespeare's "bare ruined choirs." In recent years, one thinks of Donald Hall's lamentations upon the illness and death of his wife, Jane Kenyon, in Without (Mariner Books, $13 paperback) and in last year's The Painted Bed (Mariner Books, $14 paperback). In addition, there are 61 reasons to read Hayden Carruth's fabulous collection, Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey (Copper Canyon Press, $14 paperback), but his poems about his daughter's struggle against cancer are (for me, at least) the most arrestingly insistent.

For more concentrated attention to the institutionalized rituals of illness and death, Abba Kovner's Sloan-Kettering (Schocken Books, $17) provides the poet's reflection on his own impending death, drawing the reader into a universe of hospital sounds and smells, as well as fear and fury, forgiveness and faith.

And Alan Shapiro, one of the best poets around today, provides an emotionally rich account of his Broadway-actor brother's losing battle with brain cancer in Song and Dance (Houghton Mifflin, $22, forthcoming in paperback from Mariner in February 2004). Many of Mr. Shapiro's best poems in this collection are cast as question-and-answer sessions between the poet and an unnamed interrogator. The call-and-response structure quickly draws us into a story of brotherly love and loss. The personality of the brother shines through most clearly in the closing essay (or prose poem?), "Last Impressions." One scene brings us back, unwittingly yet achingly, to the parents of Terry Schiavo. Waiting for the results of another MRI, Mr. Shapiro's brother paced in his small room until

you had had enough and opened the door
and stood there in the
doorway looking out at the doctors,
nurses, patients bustling to and fro,
you'd catch a nurse's eye and suddenly Cagney, holding on to
imaginary prison bars, would ask,
"Any news from the governor?"

Voices in chorus

There are also many good poetry anthologies devoted entirely to these themes. One fine collection pulls together 120 of the best of 10 years of weekly poems, some by professional poets and others by talented amateurs, in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The result, Uncharted Lines, edited by JAMA's poetry editor, Charlene Breedlove (Boaz, $20), traces an epiphanic line that goes to the heart of the daily practice (and patients' experience) of medicine. From another of the healing professions, Intensive Care , edited by Cortney Davis and Judy Schaefer (University of Iowa Press, $17.95 paperback) is a solid collection of poems by nurses writing from their perspective as givers and (in their occasional role of patient) receivers of care.

Dr. Jon Mukand's skills as anthologist par excellence are in abundant display in Articulations: The Body and Illness in Poetry (University of Iowa Press, $19.95 paperback). This is the strongest collection I've discovered, with poems by some of the best poets of the last half century, organized under 10 topics, including "The Body," "Patients' Views of Illness," "Views of Caregivers," "Family and Friends," and "Social Issues." Articulations is an expanded and revised version of Dr. Mukand's earlier anthology, Sutured Words, which, unfortunately, is out of print. Although most of the poems from the first collection have made it into Articulations (plus about 100 new poems), Dr. Mukand's thoughtful introductions to each section have been dropped. For their value as an anthologist's guided tour of his own collection, the essays alone justify a trip to the used-book sellers on the Internet to find a copy of Sutured Words.

Tom Mayo, an associate professor of law at Southern Methodist University, teaches "Law, Literature & Medicine."