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Full Moon Boat by Fred Marchant

In 1970, during the war in Viet Nam, Marchant became one of the first Marine officers ever to be honorably discharged as a conscientious objector. In these poems, Marchant explores the concept of violence: What are its origins and consequences? What actions of the heart and mind resist it? Marchant takes us on a voyage from childhood to adult trauma, and eventually to a peace arrived at by unflinching meditation. A hard-won peace, it is our undiscovered country.

Tipping Point by Fred Marchant

"Winner of the 1993 Word Works Washington prize." Marchant's first book considers the American appetite for self-destruction. Its distinction lies in his chiseled control of language. Control is challenged by the poet's preoccupation with violence; violence tests Marchant's mettle and seems to raise the standard of the writing. His book begins with the domestic, describing, for instance, the ``almost punitive scrub'' a father gives to his own hands--a purification also experienced as a punishment. In other poems, the same man abuses his wife in a furor that is observed with chilling precision. Honed lines and stanzas never overdramatize such situations; Marchant is melodiously severe, especially in writing about people who don't know themselves well enough to save themselves. He writes insightfully, too, about war and kindred moral dilemmas, though his strategic tact with short lines and concise stanzas may seem to outdo the accomplishment of the more visually dispersed and voluptuous war poems. Authority is one of Marchant's richest subjects: he seems to recognize its innate ugliness, but neither flees nor glamorizes it.

Eight True Maps of the West by Kevin Bowen

This collection draws upon Bowen's two previous collections--Playing Basketball with the Viet Cong, a Progressive Magazine "Pick of the Year," and Forms of Prayer at the Hotel Edison (both Curbstone Press)--and adds some forty pages of new poems. Earlier poems naturally focus on questions of war and peace but, as Bowen now spends a good deal of time in Ireland, there are several new poems dealing with the west of Ireland, and stories of family members who left or stayed behind. Bowen is Director of the Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and a recent recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry by the National Endowment for the Arts.