After years of profound spiritual work, our most powerful poet
of the Viet Nam War now turns to our potential for redemption. The
book's locus is Chung Luong, birthplace of Weigl's Vietnamese
daughter, Hanh, and one of the poorest and most beautiful places on
earth. That vivid contrast, between beauty and utter poverty, is
what drives this book, allowing the poet to view the collapse of
empire--one of the book's central themes--from a new psychic
vantage. While these tough, retrospective poems break into a new
realm of compassion and forgiveness, they are just as steely and
truth-telling as any of his earlier works, which were brilliant
explorations of the damages of war and the violent potential of the
human imagination.
But readers of Weigl's past books (among them "Song of Napalm,"
"What Saves Us," "The Monkey Wars") and his critically acclaimed
memoir, "The Circle of Hanh," will recognize the distance he has
traveled. As he himself has put it, "I began to feel as if I might
try to assume some kind of public voice, so that these poems feel
to me as if they're the most mature I've written. What drives the
form is the attitude, and what drives the attitude is the
particular take on diction; a kind of free-wheeling American-like
regard for how words mean and how they feel in your mouth when you
say them. I've never said the phrase 'this is my best book ever, '
but I can say it here because I know it is and I know what it took
to get there."
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