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In 1982, John Newman, curator of the Vietnam War Literature Collection at Colorado State University, said of W.D. Ehrhart: "As a poet and editor, Bill Ehrhart is clearly one of the major figures in Vietnam War literature." This autobiographical account of the war, the author's first extended prose work, demonstrates Ehrhart's abilities as a writer of prose as well. Vietnam-Perkasie is grim, comical, disturbing, and accurate. The presentation is novelistic--truly, a "page-turner"--but the events are all real, the atmosphere intensely evocative.
In 1993, Ehrhart began what became a five-year search for the men of his platoon. Who were these men alongside whom he trained? Why had they joined the Marines at a time when being sent to war was almost a certainty? What do they think of the war and of the country that sent them to fight it? What does the Corps mean to them? What Ehrhart learned offers an extraordinary window into the complexities of the Vietnam Generation and the United States of America then and now.
Every poet in this anthology represents the terrible beauty that Vietnam engendered in sensitive hearts, the curious grace with which the human spirit can endow even the ugliest realities."No one will get out of this volume without being hammered in the heart and singed in the soul. I could touch the tears on page after page."--Wallace Terry
In February 1967, W.D. Ehrhart was sent to Vietnam as an 18-year-old Marine Corps volunteer. In December 1985, Ehrhart and two friends, both also poets and teachers, returned to Vietnam by that government's invitation. Very few Americans have been to Vietnam since the end of the war, and barely a handful of those few have been writers. This is his story of Vietnam ten years after.
Poetry. Comprising 30 years of work from 12 collections, BEAUTIFUL WRECKAGE includes early poems never before collected along with 24 new poems. A hunger for honesty and a charged lyricism have always made Bill Ehrhart's poetry remarkably his own. Though he's best known for his Vietnam War poems, his BEAUTIFUL WRECKAGE: NEW & SELECTED POEMS includes many lovely poems not about Vietnam. "This book deserves serious recognition."--John Balaban
From 1969 to 1974 Ehrhart was just Passing Time. His reentry into the "world" began with his enrollment as a 21-year-old freshman (and token Vietnam vet) at Swarthmore College. At first simply trying to bury his past, Ehrhart slowly if inexorably came to understand what happened to him, and why, in Vietnam. Interspersed are flash-backs to the war itself. It is the story of political--and personal--awakening. As the war dragged on, the United States' deceitful involvement and its perpetuation of fallacies and lies about the war's conduct forced Ehrhart to confront his own feelings about his government, country, and self. Throughout, the reader shares with Ehrhart his odyssey through naivete, growing awareness, angry withdrawal and, finally, a measure of peace.
From 1969 to 1974 Ehrhart was just passing time. His reentry into the "world" began with his enrollment as a 21-year-old freshman (and token Vietnam vet) at Swarthmore College. At first simply trying to bury his past, Ehrhart slowly came to understand what happened to him, and why, in Vietnam. Interspersed are flashbacks to the war itself. It is the story of political--and personal--awakening. As the war dragged on, the United States' deceitful involvement and its perpetuation of fallacies and lies about the war's conduct forced Ehrhart to confront his own feelings about his government, country and self. Throughout, the reader shares with Ehrhart his odyssey through naivete, growing awareness, angry withdrawal and, finally, a measure of peace.
An anthology of Vietnam War poetry, featuring the work of seventy-five poets.
A new collection of Bill Ehrhart's essays--25 of them, written between 2002 and 2012 on subjects ranging from the Vietnam War failures of American policy-makers to life in 21st century Vietnam; the trenches of the Western Front, the mountains of Korea, the sands of Iraq; from the value of one's name to the cowardice of Congress; mountain gorillas in Rwanda, the journalist Gloria Emerson, teaching poetry to teenagers; on the famous (Wilfred Owen) and the obscure (Robert James Elliott).... These essays explore the fallacies of history, the madness of war, the craft of poetry, the profession of teaching, and the art of living.