Volume 20, Number 1 · February 8, 1973
Poetry of the Unspeakable
By Stephen Spender
Winning Hearts and Minds: War Poems by Vietnam Veterans
edited by Larry Rottmann, edited by Jan Barry, edited by Basil T. Paquet
1st Casualty Press, 119 pp., $1.95
Obscenities
by Michael Casey
Paperback Library, 68 pp., $.95
While I was, this December, writing this review of poems by Vietnam veterans about their participation in the war on the ground, B-52s were unloading their bombs on Hanoi and Haiphong. Winning Hearts and Minds (an anthology of poems by several hands) and Obscenities, by Michael Casey, coming from a period predating Nixon's Christmas, seem therefore to belong to a remote past—the guilt-ridden shouting era of President Johnson. They are written by men who, being involved in the fighting on the ground, were made to think about themselves and to care for what was being done to the Vietnamese. Today's indifference to the suffering they saw and experienced must seem to some of them like the transformation of man's normal inhumanity to man into something mechanical and more dehumanizing.
Review, 2516 words
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