Visions Of War Dreams Of Peace

Lynda Van Devanter--author of the backlist classic Home Before Morning, which inspired the TV show "China Beach"--edited this powerful collection of poems reminiscent of Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam. All author proceeds from the book will go to the Vietnam Women's Memorial Project. 6 photographs.

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.

Dismantling Glory presents the most personal and powerful words ever written about the horrors of battle, by the very soldiers who put their lives on the line. Focusing on American and English poetry from World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War, Lorrie Goldensohn, a poet and pacifist, affirms that by and large, twentieth-century war poetry is fundamentally antiwar. She examines the changing nature of the war lyric and takes on the literary thinking of two countries separated by their common language. World War I poets such as Wilfred Owen emphasized the role of soldier as victim. By World War II, however, English and American poets, influenced by the leftist politics of W. H. Auden, tended to indict the whole of society, not just its leaders, for militarism. During the Vietnam War, soldier poets accepted themselves as both victims and perpetrators of war's misdeeds, writing a nontraditional, more personally candid war poetry. The book not only discusses the poetry of trench warfare but also shows how the lives of civilians—women and children in particular—entered a global war poetry dominated by air power, invasion, and occupation. Goldensohn argues that World War II blurred the boundaries between battleground and home front, thus bringing women and civilians into war discourse as never before. She discusses the interplay of fascination and disapproval in the texts of twentieth-century war and notes the way in which homage to war hero and victim contends with revulsion at war's horror and waste. In addition to placing the war lyric in literary and historical context, the book discusses in detail individual poets such as Wilfred Owen, W. H. Auden, Keith Douglas, Randall Jarrell, and a group of poets from the Vietnam War, including W. D. Ehrhart, Bruce Weigl, Yusef Komunyakaa, David Huddle, and Doug Anderson. Dismantling Glory is an original and compelling look at the way twentieth-century war poetry posited new relations between masculinity and war, changed and complicated the representation of war, and expanded the scope of antiwar thinking.

A sweeping review of the role of women within the American military from the colonial period to the present day. In America, the achievements, defeats, and glory of war are traditionally ascribed to men. Women, however, have been an integral part of our country's military history from the very beginning. This unprecedented encyclopedia explores the accomplishments and actions of the "fairer sex" in the various conflicts in which the United States has fought. An Encyclopedia of American Women at War: From the Home Front to the Battlefields contains entries on all of the major themes, organizations, wars, and biographies related to the history of women and the American military. The book traces the evolution of their roles—as leaders, spies, soldiers, and nurses—and illustrates women's participation in actions on the ground as well as in making the key decisions of developing conflicts. From the colonial conflicts with European powers to the current War on Terror, coverage is comprehensive, with material organized in an easy-to-use, A–Z, ready-reference format.

How American Soldiers Opposed and Resisted the War in Vietnam While mainstream narratives of the Vietnam War all but marginalize anti-war activity of soldiers, opposition and resistance from within the three branches of the military made a real difference to the course of America’s engagement in Vietnam. By 1968, every major peace march in the United States was led by active duty GIs and Vietnam War veterans. By 1970, thousands of active duty soldiers and marines were marching in protest in US cities. Hundreds of soldiers and marines in Vietnam were refusing to fight; tens of thousands were deserting to Canada, France and Sweden. Eventually the US Armed Forces were no longer able to sustain large-scale offensive operations and ceased to be effective. Yet this history is largely unknown and has been glossed over in much of the written and visual remembrances produced in recent years. Waging Peace in Vietnam shows how the GI movement unfolded, from the numerous anti-war coffee houses springing up outside military bases, to the hundreds of GI newspapers giving an independent voice to active soldiers, to the stockade revolts and the strikes and near-mutinies on naval vessels and in the air force. The book presents first-hand accounts, oral histories, and a wealth of underground newspapers, posters, flyers, and photographs documenting the actions of GIs and veterans who took part in the resistance. In addition, the book features fourteen original essays by leading scholars and activists. Notable contributors include Vietnam War scholar and author, Christian Appy, and Mme Nguyen Thi Binh, who played a major role in the Paris Peace Accord. The book originates from the exhibition Waging Peace, which has been shown in Vietnam and the University of Notre Dame, and will be touring the eastern United States in conjunction with book launches in Boston, Amherst, and New York.

War is traditionally considered a male experience. By extension, the genre of war literature is a male-dominated field, and the tale of the battlefield remains the privileged (and only canonised) war story. In Australia, although women have written extensively about their wartime experiences, their voices have been distinctively silenced. Shooting Blanks at the Anzac Legend calls for a re-definition of war literature to include the numerous voices of women writers, and further recommends a re-reading of Australian national literatures, with women’s war writing foregrounded, to break the hold of a male-dominated literary tradition and pass on a vital, but unexplored, women’s tradition. Shooting Blanks at the Anzac Legend examines the rich body of World Wars I and II and Vietnam War literature by Australian women, providing the critical attention and treatment that they deserve. Donna Coates records the reaction of Australian women writers to these conflicts, illuminating the complex role of gender in the interpretation of war and in the cultural history of twentieth-century Australia. By visiting an astonishing number of unfamiliar, non-canonical texts, Shooting Blanks at the Anzac Legend profoundly alters our understanding of how Australian women writers have interpreted war, especially in a nation where the experience of colonising a frontier has spawned enduring myths of identity and statehood.