THE LICE, fiftieth anniversary edition of Merwin's major 1960s collection, via Copper Canyon Press

The Lice: Poems
W.S. Merwin
Copper Canyon Press
$15.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: This Fiftieth Anniversary edition celebrates one of the most ground-breaking books in American poetry. When first published in 1967, W.S. Merwin’s The Lice was ground-breaking. Its visionary urgency directly engaged the nexus of aesthetics and morality, exerting an immediate and lasting effect on the writing and reading of poetry. Like all great art, this monumental work continues to inspire.

As Merwin discussed in an interview, “The Lice was written at a time when I really felt there was no point in writing. I got to the point where I thought the future was so bleak that there was no point in writing anything at all. And so the poems kind of pushed their way upon me. I would be out growing vegetables and walking around the countryside when all of a sudden I’d find myself writing a poem, and I’d write it.”

My Review: Merwin died in March 2019. I first encountered his poetry in 2010, after seeing him in a documentary about the life of the Buddha. His even-tempered, self-deprecating way of puncturing the Deadly Seriousness of the other talking heads in the film was memorable; his poetic voice had to be as lovely, right?

Um. Rain in the Trees didn't wow me. It's from the 1980s sometime, and permaybehaps forty years of poeting had worn him down. It wasn't for me, as I am informed the polite formulation of "what the actual FUCK *is* this crapola anyway?!?" is phrased.

He died; I ran across that fact on Wikipedia; connected him with the nice old buffer in the Buddha thing and ILL'd this 1967 collection of Vietnam War-era stuff. It's a darn good thing I did. THIS poetry I like! Here is where the fortysomething poet whose professional life was contemporaneous with Ted Hughes, Robert Bly, Sylvia Plath, and Denise Levertov (all friends of his) and the Beats (not friends of his), those slashers-and-burners of whatever rules there were at that point, were working.

Merwin wasn't going to be a Beat, they were too raucous for him. He got Pulitzers (twice!) for poetry, he was the United States Poet Laureate, he translated Neruda, he translated Euripides, he translated Gawain and the Green Knight (Amazon link; no monetization) in 2002; he was a busy professional poet. His legacy will last a while longer, though I doubt he'll be as enduringly popular as Seamus Heaney or Neruda...not enough there, there...and he will find his way into anthologies for a while after that.

But this collection, second of Merwin's that I've read, is worthy of your eyeblinks. It says something deeply meaningful in a personal yet relatable way. Merwin wasn't a groundbreaking iconoclast, and some of his early stuff I've run across was so pretentious and self-important that I am amazed the same man wrote it as wrote these poems. His later stuff was, well, in a word it was tired. Overworked the vein, it collapsed. But this? Prime-of-life, peak-of-powers poetical punditry. Every poems means something, both on its surface and on its interior. Read a poem one way, it's pretty; read it another, it's shattering.

Let me get out of the way so you can see if you agree:

CAESAR

My shoes are almost dead
And as I wait at the doors of ice
I hear the cry go up for him Caesar Caesar

But when I look out the window I see only the flatlands
And the slow vanishing of the windmills
The centuries draining the deep fields

Yet this is still my country
The thug on duty says What would you change
He looks at his watch and he lifts
Emptiness out of the vases
And holds it up to examine

So it is evening
With the rain starting to fall forever

One by one he calls night out of the teeth
And at last I take up
My duty

Wheeling the president past banks of flowers
Past the feet of empty stairs
Hoping he's dead

DECEMBER NIGHT

The cold slope is standing in darkness
But the south of the trees is dry to the touch

The heavy limbs climb into the moonlight bearing feathers
I came to watch these
White plants older at night
The oldest
Come first to the ruins

And I hear magpies kept awake by the moon
The water flows through its
Own fingers without end

Tonight once more
I find a single prayer and it is not for men

WHEN THE WAR IS OVER

When the war is over
We will be proud of course the air will be
Good for breathing at last
The water will have been improved the salmon
And the silence of heaven will migrate more perfectly
The dead will think the living are worth it we will know
Who we are
And we will all enlist again

The thing that makes this book so lovely is that it includes a dozen or so facsimiles of Merwin's hand-written or typed manuscript pages, some on glossy photo paper and two printed inside the paper cover, that really bring the reader into Merwin's emotional orbit. Seeing the pages that he composed his thoughts on makes the typeset version of the poem (one is "Caesar," which I inserted above) that much more meaningful. His presence, albeit in mechanically reproduced form, is *there* and that causes no small amount of spiritual-connection thrums through my non-poetical soul.

THE SYMPATHIZER, a five-star twisty, turny, edge-of-my-seat read

THE SYMPATHIZER
VIET THANH NGUYEN
Grove Press
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

Don't miss this episode of Novel Dialogue with the author in very interesting conversation with a scholar of his wonderful work.

The Publisher Says: Accolades:
Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Winner of the 2016 Edgar Award for Best First Novel
Winner of the 2016 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
Winner of the 2015 California Book Award for First Fiction (Gold)
Winner of the 2016 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction
Winner of the 2015 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature for Adult Fiction

The Sympathizer is the breakthrough novel of the year. With the pace and suspense of a thriller and prose that has been compared to Graham Greene and Saul Bellow, The Sympathizer is a sweeping epic of love and betrayal. The narrator, a communist double agent, is a “man of two minds,” a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who arranges to come to America after the Fall of Saigon, and while building a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles is secretly reporting back to his communist superiors in Vietnam.

The Sympathizer is a blistering exploration of identity and America, a gripping espionage novel, and a powerful story of love and friendship.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER AT MY REQUEST. THANK YOU.

My Review: It appalls, revolts, and disgusts me that this book was Author Nguyen's first published book. It is grotesque that such a polished, accomplished, and inventive result should come first in his career. I am outraged that his naked, shameless display of far, far too much talent isn't subject to some form of censure and/or censorship.

Whatever people say about the General today, I can only testify that he was a sincere man who believed in everything he said, even if it was a lie, which makes him not so different from most.
–and–
So it was that we soaped ourselves in sadness and we rinsed ourselves with hope, and for all that we believed almost every rumor we heard, almost all of us refused to believe that our nation was dead.
–and–
What do those who struggle against power do when they seize power? What does the revolutionary do when the revolution triumphs? Why do those who call for independence and freedom take away the independence and freedom of others?

There's a reason all those accolades rained down on Author Nguyen: He bloody well earned them. (Even the squid sex scene. Yes, I said it.)

Anyone who's paid me the slightest scintilla of attention knows that I am not attracted to stories of torture and experiences of the violation kind. But this book's entire existence is, in the end, a meditation on the truth that comes out of one's existence in crisis. The corporeal violation of torture, the absolute honesty of a man in extremis, is what lifts this above sadistic pornography. It easily could have been that, in fact it was a close-run thing...but read those passages again. That isn't smut disguised as literature. That is the efflorescence of brilliance in the cess-pit of war, the striking of a tocsin for even bodily autonomy in a world very much not run for the benefit of the narrator:

All of us - we're all in jail cells without bars. We're not men anymore. Not after the Americans fucked us twice and made our wives and kids watch. First the Americans said we'll save your yellow skins. Just do what we say. Fight our way, take our money, give us your women, then you'll be free. Things didn't work out that way, did they? Then after fucking us, they rescued us. They just didn't tell us they'd cut off our balls and cut out our tongues along the way. But you know what? If we were real men, we wouldn't have let them do that.
–and–
I am merely noting that the creation of native prostitutes to service foreign privates is an inevitable outcome of a war of occupation, one of those nasty little side effects of defending freedom that all the wives, sisters, girlfriends, mothers, pastors, and politicians in Smallville, USA, pretend to ignore behind waxed and buffed walls of teeth as they welcome their soldiers home, ready to treat any unmentionable afflictions with the penicillin of American goodness.

That, mes vieux, is the unvarnished truth smacked like a haddock in our complacent, complicit faces. The author, the perpetrator of this painful outrage against our unknowing...unwilling to know...minds is just gonna keep pile-driving until his point is made. How dare you, says Author Nguyen, how bloody dare you pretend that your world-view of "freedom" can be bought with the misery and unfreedom of entire nations...and he is correct. "Freedom isn't free," say the hawkish. They don't mean it. They mean "MY freedom is worth more than yours" and they're not honest, or self-reflective, enough to say it outright.

Movies were America's way of softening up the rest of the world, Hollywood relentlessly assaulting the mental defenses of audiences with the hit, the smash, the spectacle, the blockbuster, and, yes, even the box office bomb. It mattered not what story these audiences watched. The point was that it was the American story they watched and loved, up until the day that they themselves might be bombed by the planes they had seen in American movies.
–and–
Country music was the most segregated kind of music in America, where even whites played jazz and even blacks sang in the opera. Something like country music was what lynch mobs must have enjoyed while stringing up their black victims. Country music was not necessarily lynching music, but no other music could be imagined as lynching's accompaniment. Beethoven's Ninth was the opus for Nazis, concentration camp commanders, and possibly President Truman as he contemplated atomizing Hiroshima, classical music the refined score for the high-minded extermination of brutish hordes. Country music was set to the more humble beat of the red-blooded, bloodthirsty American heartland.

What a view of the world America purveys. What a travesty of a slogan is "Freedom isn't free" in a country where even the popular culture of the place is strictly divided...youth has rap and hip-hop, the regressives have country or classical European orchestral music (depending on class), the old have yacht rock...and there are fewer and fewer places for us to meet, to exchange knowledge and ideas. Television? Not the Great Isolator it was once bemoaned to be (or else my Twitter feed is weirder than most, and my inbox full of popculture websites' come-ons is abnormal). Music, the one-time Great Uniter, ain't no more. Literature, and its bumptious cousin book publishing, are never going to rise back to the heights they once commanded. Games, computer games, MMO games, are pretty much in the grips of the lowest of the world's humans from what I can see.

Yet our films, sent all over the world!, are solidly behind a view of the USA as a Defender of Right, Justice, ORDER!

Honestly, it revolts me, this dissonance between reality (what in the name of all that's unholy did Iraq under Saddam Hussein have to do with the Al Qaeda takedown of the World Trade Center?! and that war cost thousands of lives and TRILLIONS of dollars!) and the vision in the exported product. China is on the rise, y'all, and its tastes are going to form the next wave of filmed exports, so be watching what comes up that doesn't make you feel all warm and fuzzy. You're about to get your own medicine back.

That medicine will be progressively more bitter. The author's interview, included in later editions of the book, says it succinctly (as one would expect):

I did not want to write this book as a way of explaining the humanity of Vietnamese. Toni Morrison says in Beloved that to have to explain yourself to white people distorts you because you start from a position of assuming your inhumanity or lack of humanity in other people’s eyes. Rather than writing a book that tries to affirm humanity, which is typically the position that minority writers are put into, the book starts from the assumption that we are human, and then goes on to prove that we’re also inhuman at the same time.

Are you, white readers, aware of the subtle (to us) and bitter (to those not us) demeaning subtext, if only barely so, of reading about Others? The perpetuation of Othering in confining through your commercial choices of Black, Asian-American, Hispanic, et alii writers into "explanatory" writing? Yes, you aren't doing it out of overt racist motives (or you wouldn't be likely to read my reviews) but you're enmeshed in a system of deeply, unexaminedly racist underpinnings. It is extremely difficult to break those lenses. If you try, you will fail at times. But you will, and I speak from experience, gain from every success and learn from every failure.

IF you will pursue the effort in an honest attempt to shed the ugly, distorting framework.

Starting by reading Author Nguyen's twisty, deceptive, and very very sneaky story will repay you on so many levels.

MATTERHORN by Karl Marlantes, a 6-star must-read novel

MATTERHORN
KARL MARLANTES
Atlantic Monthly Press
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five, but it deserves six

The Publisher Says: Intense, powerful, and compelling, Matterhorn is an epic war novel in the tradition of Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and James Jones's The Thin Red Line. It is the timeless story of a young Marine lieutenant, Waino Mellas, and his comrades in Bravo Company, who are dropped into the mountain jungle of Vietnam as boys and forced to fight their way into manhood. Standing in their way are not merely the North Vietnamese but also monsoon rain and mud, leeches and tigers, disease and malnutrition. Almost as daunting, it turns out, are the obstacles they discover between each other: racial tension, competing ambitions, and duplicitous superior officers. But when the company finds itself surrounded and outnumbered by a massive enemy regiment, the Marines are thrust into the raw and all-consuming terror of combat. The experience will change them forever.

My Review: Waino Mellas, newly minted Marine infantry lieutenant, arrives in the tender embrace of Bravo Company a scared, green, awkward, scared, stupid, scared kid and, after a huge amount of pain, loss, and hellish enraging waste of life and liberty, becomes a man.

No, really.

Marlantes was a Marine in Vietnam. He took thirty years...longer than most of this planet's people have been alive...to bring forth this horrifying, harrowing, agonizing artwork. I expect we will not see another book from him, or if we do, it will be so radically different from this one as to be unrecognizable as created in the same brain.

The pain and the horror are obviously not going to let him go. He's exorcised them as best a man can in writing this book. But I don't feel a sense of relief at the end of this book. I don't finish up when he stops writing. I think that's because the experience of reading this book is so shattering. OBVIOUSLY! OBVIOUSLY!! it's no smallest patch on actually living this book, but it's a rare experience to read something so complete, so clearly delineated in its scope and its purpose, and that has power...ask a demolitions person about the power of an explosion contained in a box...but more than that, it has purpose. I don't know Marlantes. I don't know that I want to. I know enough about him after reading this book to hate the idea of sending kids across oceans to kill other human beings before I think they're even ready to *love* other human beings, because so many of them won't live to become the man he has.

I hate that fact so much that I hurt inside. I want to scream and cry and rage and mourn and weep with the mothers and fathers whose souls are now scarred and deformed by the pain of losing a child. It won't help, they're launched on a horrible personal journey, but GODDAM IT they're people whose lives changed forever because of some stupid slogan like "national interest."

Ahem. The book.

So, what has Marlantes wrought? A long, hard journey of a book that millions will read some of, and back away scared...be one of the few who go the distance, and you will never, ever forget the journey or the guide. Worth it.