In the Shadow of the DMZ

In the Shadow of the DMZ is a book-length poem about war—its terror and initiation. The poet works backwards and forward from the London Blitz to Vietnam to Iraq and 9/11. The sea is the poet’s central metaphor. An ammunition ship is the vehicle for a journey inside war and the psychological, theological and philosophical implications when one resides in that middle zone of the DMZ, lost in those shadows. The DMZ is an actual, naturalistic zone and also a place of psychological terror. The book charts these terrors at the hands of family, church and culture, and then the escape to the sea, the East, and the women who follow the Seventh Fleet. In Jungian terms, this is the trajectory of the Puer, an ageless Peter Pan who, like the book’s narrator, navigates by the stars, and his rhumb line course is onward and upward. In the Shadow of the DMZ imagines war as an extension of psychology and theology. The book also places war in the context of culture and evokes the democratic chauvinism of Whitman and the melancholy commentary of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, finding a juiced-up jingoism and materialism inside the American warrior soul, a doorway to 9/11.

James C. McCullagh is a writer, editor, poet, and media specialist. He has worked in international publishing for thirty years, launching magazines, web and related digital businesses in Brazil, China, India, the UK, South Korea, Romania, Mexico and elsewhere, for Rodale, Hachette, Scientific American, the Magazine Media Association and Qualcomm. He was the founding editor of Bicycling Magazine, launch publisher for the first international edition of Men's Health in the UK, and responsible for one of the first digital magazine subscription efforts in Brazil. He has written and edited more than a dozen books with Rodale, Dell, Warner Books and CreateSpace on subjects ranging from solar greenhouses to appropriate technology to cycling for fitness. He has published two novels with CreateSpace: The Sirens of Vulture Creek and Limey Down and a book of poems: Set Pieces of the Feminine. In the Shadow of the DMZ significantly expands and deepens themes touched on in an earlier book, That Kingdom Coming Business, which grew out of his Vietnam War experience. He was born in London, served in the U.S., Navy, and received a PhD from Lehigh University.