Deaths 2

Cynthia Macdonald, whose idiosyncratic blend of humor and the grotesque made her a distinctive voice on the American poetry scene, died on Aug. 3 in a nursing home in Logan, Utah. She was 87.

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“People forget their children in the strangest places,” the poem “Casual Neglects” begins. “Crossing Fifth in front of Saks, Little Jane/left behind.” It concludes: “The air is absent-minded/and the empty sky of Paradise is pocked with small pink shells,/those baby fingernails which couldn’t quite keep holding on.”

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She trained as a Freudian psychoanalyst at the Houston-Galveston Psychoanalytic Institute, becoming certified in 1986. She later joined the faculty there. As a practitioner, she specialized in treating patients with writer’s block.

/ William Grimes, New York Times AUG. 24