The Battlefield Photographer, and: Fool's Gold, and: Rotogravure, and: Wayfare (review)

This review may strike some readers as an odd assortment of poetry, especially if they are looking for garments cut from common cloth. In fact, it is the diversity, the sheer "differentness," of these four collections that suggests why we might consider them together. The poets represent a broad spectrum of contemporary American poetry, and all have college or university ties as teachers and writers. This is a "grown-up" poetry, informed and illuminated by mature reflection upon the community of human experience and richly nuanced in sound, sense, and artistry.

Take Carmine Sarracino's The Battlefield Photographer, a meditation in many voices on that most tragic—and heroic—of American experiences, the Civil War. Framed by the voice of the Gettysburg Battlefield Museum guide, the poems consider that great war's human toll through voices ranging from Walt Whitman's and Mary Chesnutt's to those of fictional (but historically based) characters like Corporal Joseph Hughes and Sergeant Kurt Miller. Miller, who commands a charge at Chancellorsville despite a wound in his hip that fills his boot with blood before he falls, worries in touchingly human fashion that his wound may not be sufficiently "heroic":

I thought of mother and wisht I might livejust so long to be hit in the chest or faceand so not bring her shame, nor any folks at home.

("The Courage of Sergeant Kurt Miller")

Adopting both the participants' voices and the idiomatic speech and (mis)spelling that make their letters and journals so poignant to modern readers, Sarracino creates a rich texture of intensely human experience—of courage, of suffering, of terror—that transcends time and is as riveting today as it was a century and a half ago.

Another is the terrible freight of the hospital ships, for instance, that Whitman met at the wharf in Baltimore harbor, a bag of oranges ready to distribute, pen and paper ready to take down letters, last words, a heart full of sorrow and love:

Under a crescent moon the shipschurn into Baltimore harbor, slowly rocking,creaking, so that many of the boys, dreamywith anodynes, smile into their mothers' faces.

Some will be delivered dead. Othersmissing the legs, hands, feet and arms droppedbeside the surgeons's tables for burial in pits.Many expected to heal in days will die.

("The Hospital Ships")

Modern technological warfare produces horrors no less terrible, nor are the images of coffins and dead alike that the government tries to ban any less real to those whose spouses and children continue to fall. It is hard to imagine today such graphic displays of battlefield carnage as Matthew Brady's New York photo exhibitions mounted for citizens living at that remove from war's brutality. Even television shies away from such stark reality; because no network dares show the shot-up, bloated, decaying bodies, modern media-mediated war is eerily antiseptic, the stuff of TV—unless of course it is one's family that is devastated. The Civil War touched every family, though: no one escaped, least of all Tim O'Sullivan, the workmanlike battlefield photographer:

Subjects aplenty cover the ground:Declined in repose. On bellies flopped.

Twisted in gymnastic falls.Fetally curled.

Leaned against stumps and wagon wheels.Mowed in ranks like sheaves of wheat.

Bodies, no heads.Legs, no bodies. Heads.

A solitary heap of insides here.There a corpse with nary a scratch.. . . . . . . . . . . . .He bundles the prints to Mr. Bradywho shops them all about New York

editors clamoring o'er one anotherfor timely images of The War.

("The Battlefield Photographer")

Profiteering at the expense of the dead, no less pervasive in the contemporary world in which war is still Big Business, is never far from war and its victims, and that knowledge makes a book like this one all the more compelling. But more so is the record it traces, in the characters and voices of The...