Poets Offer Their Viewpoint on War
Portsmouth Herald
Sunday April 2, 2006
by Rebecca Rule

    If you’re bone weary of listening to talking heads spin this war and wars in the making, turn your ear to the poets. Maybe the poets know how to save us. Maybe they will, if we let them. Editors Patricia Frisella of Farmington and Cicely Buckley of Durham spent more than a year gathering poems for “The Other Side of Sorrow: Poets Speak Out about Conflict, War and Peace.”
    The project began, Frisella told me, with Sam Hamill, a West Coast author of more than 30 books of poetry, essays and translations. Hamill called on poets across the country to host community readings to address the then-impending war with Iraq. Hamill, founder of Poets Against the War, is a man with passion fueled convictions – and he’s not afraid to express them, as he does in this column from Poets Against the War newsletter Winter, 2006: 

    In what country am I living?
    Nero Fiddled while Rome burned. Our guy’s lighting matches.
    Does anyone give a damn about gulags or massive eavesdropping on
such “threats” as the Quakers or students for nonviolence?
    Does anyone object to the shredding of our Constitution?
    Does anyone find “the war on terror” to be a declaration of perpetual war and a march into fascism, and does anyone find that idea appalling?
    Does anyone object to energy politics written by energy companies that turn record-breaking profits while the citizenry shells out hundreds of billions of dollars for an immoral war and billions more in the wake of Katrina?
    War profiteers make war. But the blood stains each of us on every side.

    Here in New England, many responded to Hamill’s passion, answered his call and the readings began. “Both readers and audience,” the editors say, “many of them veterans, were surprised by the deep grief, anger and hope expressed. The idea of the book came naturally, and a year was spent tracking down poems heard at these readings and beyond.”

  Some of the poems come from writers whose work we know well: Maxine Kumin, winner of the Pulitzer Prize;Cynthia Huntington, former N.H. poet laureate; Robert Dunn, John Perrault and Maren Tirabassi, former Portsmouth poet laureates; Mimi White, current Portsmouth poet laureate.

  Others, say the editors, “do not consider themselves poets (but) know this is the medium through which they can best convey thoughts on such a prodigious topic. Many are simply poets toiling in the fields of words and finding land mines where there should be rutabegas.”
    The editors’ search yielded many more poems than the book could hold, even when it grew from the 160 pages planned to nearly 250 pages. Frisella says they were able to print about half of the poems received. Along the way, they worked with some poets to revise “poems that had promise but lacked polish.”
        And “as we went along if we heard or read a poem we wanted, we tracked it down.”

In this way, the poems of Bat-Chen Shahak found their way into the anthology. This was a girl who died in a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv in 1996.
In this way, poems by Sorley MacLean found their way in. MacLean – a Scot born in 1911 – spent a lifetime addressing injustice, in particular the Clearances foisted on the Gaels. The anthology’s title is drawn from his poem, “The Cuillin”:

Beyond the lochs of the blood of the children of men,
beyond the frailty of the plain and the labor of the mountain,
beyond poverty, consumption, fever, agony,
beyond hardship, wrong, tyranny, distress,
beyond misery, despair, hatred, treachery,
beyond guilt and defilement; watchful,
heroic, the Cuillin is seen
rising on the other side of sorrow.

    The poets of “The Other Side of Sorrow” write about many wars. Frisella says, “We were very partial to veterans, and you will see that there are veterans from WWII through the current year in Iraq.” And yet, the editors add, “this book is not intended to be a polemic against war, but a view of the world in conflict through the eyes of poets. Perhaps, to paraphrase Whitman, it will bring hope to the downtrodden and strike terror in the hearts of despots. Perhaps it will help turn the barge of conflict toward more peaceful shores.”

Congratulations to the Poetry Society of New Hampshire, which published this book,  and to Pat Frisella and Cicely Buckley, whose vision guided it into print. On these pages readers will find hundreds of poems on the subject of war. Some are gentle, some violent; some ugly, some beautiful; some abstract, some painfully detailed; some ironic, some raging; some full of despair, some acknowledging hope.

I wish there were space here to quote a hundred of them. I wish I could choose one that would give the full flavor of this ambitious and provocative volume. Instead, as a token, I offer this small poem by Gary Widger of Dover – a poem, he explains, “that concerns itself with the sadness of war, of people hurting and being hurt.”

     Winter 1939

The boot prints around the grave
are small German snow angels.

Today is a good day, because of the snow
falling and falling so we can pretend
the winter is done.

  “The Other Side of Sorrow” is available at independent bookstores or may be ordered by e-mail from: frisella@worldpath.net. [Also available on Amazon.]


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