Unaccustomed Mercy

Every poet in this anthology represents the terrible beauty that Vietnam engendered in sensitive hearts, the curious grace with which the human spirit can endow even the ugliest realities."No one will get out of this volume without being hammered in the heart and singed in the soul. I could touch the tears on page after page."--Wallace Terry

Gale Researcher Guide for: The Vietnam War in Literature and Its Aftermath is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.

The first reference to literary and cultural representations of war in 20th-century English & US literature and film.Covering the two World Wars, the Spanish Civil War, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the War on Terror, this Companion reveals the influence of modern wars on the imagination.These newly researched and innovative essays connect ’high’ literary studies to the engagement of film and theatre with warfare, extensively covers the literary and cultural evaluation of the technologies of war and open the literary field to genre fiction.Divided into 5 sections: 20th-Century Wars and Their Literatures; Bodies, Behaviours, Cultures; The Cultural Impact of the Technologies of Modern War; The Spaces of Modern War & Genres of War Culture.Key Features: * All-new original essays commissioned from major critics and cultural historians.* Reflects the way war studies are currently being taught and researched: in the volume’s approach, structure and breadth of coverage.* For scholars: core arguments and detailed research topics.* For students: Historically grounded topic- and genre-based essays, useful forstudying the modern period and war modules.

Denne bog giver en udviklingshistorie om den amerikanske soldat fra Anden Verdenskrig og frem til Vietnam-krigen. Hvordan soldaten er blevet repræsenteret på film, i medier (aviser og tidsskrifter), udstillinger og gennem andre formidlingsformer, diskuteres i denne bog.

This is a collection of essays on the life and writing of W.D. Ehrhart, poet, essayist, memoirist and teacher. The twenty contributors--scholars, publishers, poets--are from the U.S., France, Britain, the Netherlands, Austria, India and Japan. Some are Vietnam or Iraq war veterans. The collection overall studies various aspects of Ehrhart's writing, as well as his direct influence on the lives of people, both as a writer and as a teacher. The volume concludes with a selection of Ehrhart poems chosen by the contributors because they embody some quality discussed in the essays. The book includes a selected bibliography of Bill Ehrhart's published writings.

Although poets have written about warfare since at least the time of Homer, the Vietnam war has struck many observers as being immune to the interpretations of poetry and myth. "Lyric poetry of a traditional kind," writes one critic, "has proved inappropriate to communicate the character of the Vietnam war, its remoteness, its jargonized recapitulations, its seeming imperviousness to aesthetics." Nonetheless, the past two decades have seen an unprecedented outpouring of poetry that seeks to describe and come to terms with that bitterly divisive conflict. In Radical Visions Vince Gotera argues that poetry written by Vietnam veterans underlines the failure of traditional American myths to help Americans understand the war and its aftermath. The book blends sociohistorical commentary with close readings of individual works by such poets as Michael Casey, Walter McDonald, and W. D. Ehrhart. In the book's first section, "The 'Nam," Gotera examines several key mythic structures--the Wild West (a violent extension of the mythic virgin land), the machine in the garden, the city on the hill, regeneration through violence--all of which helped delude Americans about Vietnam and the war being fought there. In the second part, "The World," Gotera shows how another myth, the American Adam as an exemplar of ahistorical innocence, proved unusable for returning veterans attempting to readjust to American life. In addition to exposing these failed myths, Gotera argues, the poetry by Vietnam veterans reflects an effort to construct new myths--most notably that of the "warrior against war," an oxymoronic structure arising from the difficulties faced by returning veterans. In the book's final chapters, Gotera examines the work of Bruce Weigl and Yusef Komunyakaa, two poets whom the author considers most successful at portraying the moral absurdity of the Vietnam war without sacrificing lyrical aesthetics. The first comprehensive study devoted exclusively to poetry by Vietnam veterans, Radical Visions argues that this body of writing registers an important advance in the aesthetics and poetics of war literature and offers a cogent antiwar statement rooted in personal experience.

Earth Songs unveils extraordinary views of the world discovered by a soldier-turned-poet amid a bitter war and brittle peace. From flowers blooming in battle zones to a dying love's parting words, these poems crackle with life amid death, a storyteller's own true song.