Archeology of the Circle
New and Selected Poems
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
A “tough and honest” collection by one of America’s foremost poets of the combat experience—“A treasure of wonderful simplicity and complex beauty” (Clarence Major, author of Configurations).
With Song of Napalm, Bruce Weigl established himself as a poet of incomparable power and lyric fury, whose work stands as an elegy to the countless lives dramatically altered by war. Archeology of the Circle brings together the major work of this major American poet.
Collected here for the first time—from eight volumes of poetry spanning two decades—Archeology of the Circle charts Weigl’s literary arc toward a hard-bitten and sensuous lyric. Out of the horror of individual experience, he has fashioned poetry that offers solace to the disillusioned and bears transcendent resonance for all of us. Archeology of the Circle illustrates Bruce Weigl’s remarkable creative achievements and signifies his own personal salvation through his writing.
“Few poets of any generation have written so searingly into of the trauma of war, inscribing its wound while refusing the fragile suture of redemption. Here is the haunted utterance of diasporic selfhood, a poetry of aftermath and consequence, an answer to the call for an ethos of infinite obligation. In this, and in the breadth of his accomplishment, Bruce Weigl is one of the most important poets of our time.” —Carolyn Forch, author of The Country Between Us
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The first five volumes covered in Weigels Archeology (1976s Executioner to 1988s Song of Napalm) dwell on Weigls firsthand experiences of Americas southeast Asian war, returning obsessively to combat terror, witnessed atrocities and cravings for underaged prostitutes. However laudable his brutal honesty, lines like I was barely in country soon become tiresome. Weigls best poems come from his three 1990s volumes (particularly from After the Others, represented in Archeology with selections marked as New Poems) where he begins to distill his themes of disgust and horror within non-Vietnam contexts. Weigls most grimly powerful poems, all found in Archeology, are The Impossible, an account of being forced, as a seven-year-old boy, to perform oral sex on a strange man, and The Nothing Redemption, a disgusting vision of a young man whose hole/ was plastered closed with his own excrement in an attempt to disqualify himself from military service. Snowy Egret (from 1985) and Carp (a more pressurized rhyme sonnet from 1996s Sweet Lorain) are convincing documents of regret for mindless boyhood destruction of animal life. The complex and unsettling Pineapple (appearing in both volumes) is a recollection of a womans seductive behavior in a supermarket fruit aisle; tinged with lust and violence, it somehow reaches its dark climax in the narrators refusal to respond to the womans advances. That poem and other notables in After the Others (such as the squalid The Singing and the Dancing and the desperate Anniversary of Myself) make that book the most consistently rewarding effort from this still evolving poet.
