Brother, Can You Spare a War? - poetry by Lynn Veach Sadler

Dec. 16, 2011 - PRLog -- War and Poetry? Poetry by Lynn Veach Sadler is a book every poetry lover must have!

Through a carrousel of poems paying tribute to a range of emotions covering sarcastic, factual, dramatic, comic, demanding, accusing - Dr. Lynn Veach Sadler time-travels and place-travels, visiting humanity’s belligerent history with her clear, sharp, deeply penetrative scalpel of words. And there is absolutely no doubt as to the whereabouts of her sympathies’ lair.


Foreword

Though war is “raw” and looks backward, I do not, as in Snakes in the Sass, write a “Backword.” Yet, as many of the poems in this collection insist, war literally embraces death and drives life and that which makes it life—spirit and intellect—always backward. War has contempt for human intelligence.

The poems here throw up such motives for war as evil hating good, an inheritance of Nature’s propensity to accrete and be corroded, excuse, plain old pelf (including the raping of other cultures), exploration, conquest . . . . In the aggregate, war wars against animals, races, ideas, wives/women and more, as well as pitting humans against humans. In the midst of its attendant horrors, individuals plead to be remembered, try to purge the evil from themselves and repair their worlds, sift for meaning and traces of lives and cultures . . . .

Specifically, these poems offer up wars well known (e.g., World War II, Vietnam, today’s Iraq and Afghanistan), wars hardly known (e.g.,The Quasi-War), and wars that should be better known (e.g., upheavals in South America, The Korean War). Along the way, they sample, as examples, ancient enmities (Romans vs. Christians) and the near annihilation of Native Americans/other indigenous groups. I have had collections published on the second and on America’s War Between the States; only one poem (“Heart Divided”) is repeated from them.

A dominant theme is what war teaches and to our offspring in particular. A number of the poems thus let children/teenagers respond to war and show how it molests them. Questions are thrown up. Can we still have warriors as “fierce and honorable” as the Maoris? What happens to those on the “wrong side” in their own countries? How do the stance and course get moved from individual to country to world? Have we had “good wars”? Do we have “good wars” now?

The last two of those queries reverberate in “The Croatian Spring” of the last line of “Sucking Snake Venom” and turn the thoughts to the current “Arab Spring.” Similarly, today’s protests against the Stock Exchange recall Abbie Hoffman’s throwing dollars onto its floor and leading fifty thousand Yippies “to surround the Pentagon and levitate it/with their combined psychic energy” [“Abbie Hoffman, Nam (and So Much More)”].

Milton taught me the human responsibility to examine alternatives, including, especially, the likely actions one’s stances will evoke from others. As the Dubrovnik tiles ask (“The Tiles War”), “Why can’t humans compromise before—/not after—war?”

I find myself having stayed away from what scares me most about war today—our helplessness in the face of those convinced that their salvation is killing themselves to devour as many others as they can take with them. Minds must focus to resolve this dilemma, or the world is lost.

~ Lynn Veach Sadler ~



To order:

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/brother-can-you-spa...

# # #

Aquillrelle is a site dedicated to every poet amongst us – encouraging the type of poetry which is a mix of talent, beauty and expression power. We do it by organizing poetry contests open to all, and biased by nothing but down to earth creativity.