I’ve been trying my hand at some reviewing the past couple weeks, in part to get over my fear of it. The fear still exists, and it’s far easier to write a review for a book I felt some connection with vs. one I didn’t, but I’m still finding my mind resists putting down in writing my experience of a book, especially if it’s a volume of poetry. With that said, you can check out my attempts: two blurbs I wrote over on Fiction Writers Review. And here are my thoughts on Grady Harp’s War Songs:
“Pain not felt is living pain–pain felt is past pain.”
A slender and moving volume of twenty poems culled from the notebooks of Dr. Grady Harp while a Battalion Surgeon in Vietnam. The poems accompany images of Stephen Freedman’s clay vessels, a collaborative project where Grady’s poems are inscribed on the clay walls. And on some of the large urns and pots and coffin-shaped boxes, the words are not only inscribed but literally cut out of the clay creating these negative spaces of pattern and breath, especially as the word sizes vary. It’s as if the clay itself were speaking or reciting the poems as the words spiral from top to bottom, around every curve and declivity. I only wish I could see the vessels in person. Some of the pictures left me breathless; I can’t imagine what it would be like to see one close up.
The poems are at once rightfully spare in the face of such horror, and yet the depths of each resonate with the choice and haunting images recounted. For instance, in #12, one I can’t get out of my head: “War makes you do such things / as keeping an IV running on a dead body all night / so his neighboring wounded buddy / won’t give up…” and then the catch in the throat when paired with those final lines “I heard a lot of one-way conversations / at night / in Vietnam.” And Grady rightfully lets the soldiers speak, taking the snippets of story from the wounded as they confide in the doctor-speaker, locating the rhythm and music and imagery that makes each its own poem, as in these lines from the brief monologue of #10: “…I seen my boot / across the path and it was pumping man my fuckin’ leg / oh God I didn’t even feel it, Doc…”
At the time of this publication and exhibit it was 20 years after Vietnam, and as both Grady and Stephen allude to in their opening and closing essays respectively, the occasion of this work and the silence-breaking to tell what was seen, what was witnessed and heard in Vietnam, draws parallels to the friends and loved ones lost to AIDS. These poems, these clay vessels are attempts to preserve and honor, to make sense of loss in the face of incomprehensible death, and within the negative space of word-skin and clay-skin, a place to heal.