Beautiful Wreckage: New & Selected Poems

All these years after Vietnam Ehrhart cannot let go. Yes he goes other places: love of wife and child, memories of childhood friends and the ever unresolved situation with parents. Work, and lack of it, career and setbacks are here too, also the awareness of age as friends suffer heart attacks, as the sense of "last time" invades visits, as old places of the heart vanish. All of it presented with Erhart's deceptive simplicity, his matter of fact voice. But Vietnam, oh Vietnam. He sucks the broken tooth of remorse. Reveals the horror lurking outside the circle of his personal fire. Suddenly it reaches in, a paw touching the present: Guatamala, Bagdad, or just a street corner in Philadelphia. And he condemns it looking, hoping for justice, like a child who has been told that last lie which reveals truth. He eschews excuse for himself as an adult who could have said that one soothing word that can no longer be said. One who looks upon his thoughtless childhood cruelties and rues. He cannot help touching the sore spot. He cannot forgive himself, even though others forgive him. And so for any reader swimming along in the poetic mind this is an examination of conscience. Ehrhart is not an academic poet, nor does his skill sparkle. Not as given to delicate images as fellow Vietnam poet Balaban, he nevertheless has some interesting pieces of wordwork in this anthology of often narrative lyrics. His diction is the diction of polite discourse. His familiarity with traditional poetry shows at times in congruent images and themes. For me, this is the work of an authentic poet. It shows why we need poetry.

The poetry of W.D. Ehrhart is chiselled from the granite of raw experience. He closes his eyes to nothing, and his honesty carves verse which is spare and direct yet elegant-also often melodic and lyrical. His words pierce the heart like a steel-tipped arrow. Although best known for his meditations on and recollections of the war in Vietnam, here we experience a full range of life: his first French kiss; his dropping off of his daughter at school; his jogging through Chicago and Philadelphia; his cats; his hopes, his fears, and his joys. Ehrhart's words haunt. They reverberate in one's brain and invite rereading. Don't miss this retrospective of a voice pure as a midnight cry of love and pain.