Young Dwaine Rieves was reluctant to move to Natchez in 1983, a new doctor with his eyes set on specialized training outside of his home state.

But he had a debt to pay to Mississippi for the medical education he received.

A native of Amory, he went to the University of Mississippi and on to the University Medical Center. Next, he went to Vanderbilt University to complete his training in internal medicine — and then back to Mississippi for his residency.

Now, more than 20 years later, the hard-learned lessons in an overcrowded, under-staffed public health clinic in Natchez and the kind of intimate medicine a physician practices in such a setting have spawned unexpected results for Rieves.

“I spent two years in Natchez,” he said. “The pace was nothing like the medical center. It allowed a little time to think. I began to write poetry as an outlet.”

His interest in poetry continued as he moved on to other work in another place. As with his work in Natchez in the mid 1980s, the new medical setting allowed him to see often the social injustices that come to light in public health work.

Recently, his poetry won first place in the Tupelo Press annual contest. As winner, he saw his work published in a book, “When the Eye Forms,” issued by the Dorset, Vt., press in 2006.

Rieves will be in Natchez Saturday, 1 to 3 p.m., to sign copies of his books at Cover to Cover Books & More, 401 Main St.

“It was a big challenge to come to work for public health,” Rieves said. “And it was a controversial time because Charity (Hospital) was closing.”

It was an eye-opener, he said. “So much of public health is concerned with social matters,” he said. “In medicine you focus on the science. I quickly learned, especially from the nursing staff, that just getting the resources for the patients could be a challenge.”

There was a child born with diabetes. Help for that mother and child came from the Red Cross “and from the church ladies, who stepped right in to help. You realize how important networking is in a small town, just knowing people in town.”

Rieves lived in an apartment near downtown Natchez, spent free time roaming the city and especially the bluff along the Mississippi River. One of his poems is titled “Mississippi.”

“I’ve been told it’s one of my best,” he said. “After a busy day at the clinic, walking on those bluffs made you feel you’re looking at all America. It was renewing.”

He writes in that poem:

“You’d heard the hearts all day. Eyes closed, an empty river, a swollen stream. … You close your eyes and hear the unending descent, wind coursing over the heartless river, the sky that follows.”

“I’m glad for my time in Natchez,” he said. “I have even thought that when I retire I might look into coming there.”

From Natchez, Rieves moved to the Washington, D.C., area where a fellowship allowed him to concentrate on critical care medicine at the National Institutes of Health and also on training in pulmonary medicine at Johns Hopkins.

At the same time, he volunteered at a clinic for gay men, an experience that paralleled his Natchez Charity Hospital work.

He lost his heart to public health medicine and continues to work in it today in the Commission Corps, the uniformed division of the Health Service.

“Recently, I was in Texas working after Hurricane Rita. I was there when I was called about the Tupelo prize,” he said. “I had come very close to not entering. I thought the Tupelo Press was too competitive.”

Rieves describes his poetry as “narrative, predominantly, in the tradition of a story teller. It’s an anthology of patients, mostly.”

The genesis of the collection was his observation of the patients he saw in Natchez. “Natchez gave me an opportunity to really see people,” he said.

He writes in lyrical tones about the young rural patient in Natchez with “thrush,” as about the young urban patient in D.C. with AIDS.

He writes of a funeral, the contrast between the darkness of “viewing time” inside the funeral home across the street and the azaleas that “dance about the veranda, April unlayering red, like Lautrec’s madames, flipping saloon girl skirts, working a syncopated twist of upturned hips.”

Carolyn Fourche, a judge in the Tupelo contest, says on the book’s jacket that Rieves’ work is “first and foremost a book of people.”

She says that he “knows with an earned heart-knowledge that each human face can provide a map — leading us into the miracle of creation itself.”

Rieves said it is not always easy to know exactly where a poem begins. But, “I think good poems come from an unsettled place,” he said.