Interview with Randy Brown

Interview with Randy Brown Randy Brown is a poet, journalist, and editor, and a leading figure in the veterans’ writing movement. He is the author of the award-winning poetry collection Welcome to FOB Haiku (Middle West Press, 2015); editor of a 2016 book-length collection of citizen-soldier journalism; poetry editor of the on-line literary journal As … Read more

Review: Alan Farrell, Expended Casings

Review: Alan Farrell, Expended Casings In his foreword (whimsically rendered “Deployed Forward”) to this collection of his poems, Alan Farrell ridicules pretension, incomprehensibility, poetry as therapy, literary critical jargon, posturing, the cult of free verse, swingebuckling, and shallow war poetry cliches. You sense that he is trying to be restrained and polite, and barely succeeding. … Read more

Edward Jasowitz, “Courtship in Italy”

Edward Jasowitz, “Courtship in Italy” Circumstances change the fashion,
 flowers and music yield to C-rations. This modest epigram is from a 1945 anthology of poems published in the Mediterranean edition of Stars and Stripes. I know nothing about Edward Jasowitz, and neither does Google, but I am grateful for these two lines. Most American soldiers … Read more

Keith Douglas’s “Christodoulos”

Keith Douglas’s “Christodoulos” Christodoulos moves, and shakeshis seven chins. He is that freaka successful alchemist, and makesGod knows how much a week. Out of Christodoulosʼ attic,full of smoke and smells, emergesoldiers like ants, with antsʼ erraticgestures seek the pavementʼs verge; weak as wounded, leaning in a knotshout in the streets for an enemy —the dross … Read more

Keith Douglas’s “Egypt”

Keith Douglas’s “Egypt” Egypt Aniseed has a sinful taste;at your elbow a woman’s voicelike I imagine the voice of ghosts,demanding food. She has no grace but, diseased and blind of an eyeand heavy with habitual dolourlistlessly finds you and Iand the table, are the same colour. The music, the harsh talk, the fineclash of the … Read more

Henry Lee’s “Starvation Romance”

Henry Lee “Starvation Romance” Starvation Romance I dream so often of the days we knewThose days when love was like a guiding light,And yet although I know your eyes were blue,Although I swore to be forever true,Although I dream of going home to youYour name has slipped my memory tonight. Unlike many soldier poets and … Read more

Review: Alice Oswald’s Memorial

Review: Alice Oswald’s Memorial If Alice Oswald’s Memorial is not the greatest English-language war poem of modern times, I can hardly wait to discover a better one. Alice Oswald’s idea was simple but brilliant. Writers talk sometimes about encountering a work that they wish they had written themselves, and Memorial would be such a work … Read more

Review: Camouflage for the Neighborhood

Review: Camouflage for the Neighborhood Unlike most books of poetry, which are collections of separate poems ignoring each other like subway commuters, Lorene Delany-Ullman’s Camouflage for the Neighborhood is better understood, in fact only understood, as a single coherent work, the whole being far greater than the sum of its parts. Collectively the 71 prose … Read more

Review: Welcome to FOB Haiku

Review: Welcome to FOB Haiku In Welcome to FOB Haiku (Middle West Press, 2015), Randy Brown has written some of the best poetry that I know of to come out of our war in Afghanistan. Most poets surely hope that their books of poetry will last, but most books of poetry end up as ephemera … Read more

Review: In Cadence

Review: In Cadence In Cadence (2016) gathers about three dozen poems by C. Rodney Pattan and Lance B. Brender. Make that Col. Pattan amd Maj. Brender, as both poets are in the U. S. Army. Col. Pattan, an OB/GYN physician, is Deputy Commander of Clinical Services at Ft. Leonard Wood in Missouri, and the author of … Read more