Items related to Eight True Maps of the West: Poems
Synopsis
This collection draws upon Bowen's two previous collections--Playing Basketball with the Viet Cong, a Progressive Magazine "Pick of the Year," and Forms of Prayer at the Hotel Edison (both Curbstone Press)--and adds some forty pages of new poems. Earlier poems naturally focus on questions of war and peace but, as Bowen now spends a good deal of time in Ireland, there are several new poems dealing with the west of Ireland, and stories of family members who left or stayed behind. Bowen is Director of the Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and a recent recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry by the National Endowment for the Arts.
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Bowen served in Vietnam, which he has revisited often, and also journeys to the west of Ireland, whose off-coast islands his forebears left for America a century ago and where he lives when away from America. His keenly envisioned, keenly emotional poems are preponderantly set in Vietnam and Ireland, and they seem to verify the predicament of so many Americans that Thomas Wolfe (wasn't it?) spoke of: to be unable to be at home in their own country. Drawn from Bowen's two previous collections, the poems in the first half here are elegiac and affectionate, sorrowing and affirmative when they focus on soldiers in Vietnam and Vietnamese common people; critical and highly compassionate when focused on Americans in America. "For Myles Who Communes with Planes," about a nine-month-old's joy, is a scintillating exception to Bowen's predominant somberness. In the second half come more Vietnam poems--Bowen is one of the best 'Nam-vet poets--and the Irish poems, powerfully capped by the exquisitely paced long poem centered on Bowen's emigrant forebears. Ray Olson
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- PublisherDedalus Ltd
- Publication date2003
- ISBN 10 1904556043
- ISBN 13 9781904556046
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages104
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Eight True Maps of the West: New and Selected Poems
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