The Million Dollar Hole [Paperback]

Michael Casey (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

After the Vietnam War-fueled Obscenities won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1972 and then went on to sell a McKuen-like 100,000 copies in mass market paperback, Casey's work surfaced in literary journals for the next 20-odd years and then again in book form with 1996's small press Millrat. In this new volume (with an upstart Washington, D.C., press that "reads unsolicited manuscripts and tries to publish books on their merit, both literary and commercial"), Casey's speaker relates, with a hypermasculine, quasi-Beat sensibility that is paradoxically well-controlled, the workaday inertia of the military man during peacetime: "the bus driver is furious/ but I am bored/ I stop the bus/ and avoid the rolling Pepsi can/ I speak with a command voice/ ID cards and passes please." Over the course of stints in the "Outpatient Clinic, General Wood Hospital," in an imagined "Nuclear Accident Reaction Force" and a "Chevy Two Cruiser with a Double Bubble," the affectless first person, aided by a total absence of punctuation, gathers momentum and resists, with some success, closure: "and for every willie AWOL deserter brought in/ the Missouri Highway Police get a bounty/ like a devil capturing souls I say/ and John says of course/ they have sneakers or boots mostly/ not shoes." The speaker's general ambivalence, manifest in his shifting personas--here identifying with various victimized parties, there muttering in righteous resentment--is by turns jaded and ingenuous, perspicacious and credulous, empathetic, cold-eyed and crass, as he details life on and after the base. That voice wears thin over these 62 short, plot-driven recitations, but fans of the more ornate dispatches of Bruce Weigl or Yusef Komunyakaa will find it a bracing blast from the ranks. (Feb.)Forecast: The moment of Obscenities is obviously long past, but these poems and their quiet presentation seem a dignified attempt at defusing any remaining hype. Love 'em or leave 'em.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Kipling's Barrack-Room Ballads swept the world with their gritty realism and harsh vernacular and long divided critics over whether they were genuine poetry. Casey's poems in Vietnam-era draftees' patois may deserve to sweep the world but would divide critical opinion only if they were as imperialist as Kipling's work. But Casey's personae, mostly MPs at Fort Leonard Wood, as was Casey, never think about empire. They relate the stupid and stupefying antics, plenty of them damned dangerous, of bored young trainees and the equally bored young men who have to arrest them and mind them in the stockade. Knife fights, brawls, drunken pranks, wife-beating by married noncoms, traffic accidents, suicides--such is the brutal stuff of these poems. Their speakers' rough pronunciation and grammar, including unexpected but utterly convincing 10-dollar words and sophisticated phrases, make them yet more brutal. Unlike Kipling's soldiers, these young Americans have no sentiment or pride. They're just timeserving, waiting to go to Vietnam--or not. They're the green young cousins of Prewitt in James Jones' From Here to Eternity .. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

• Paperback: 72 pages
• Publisher: Orchises Pr (January 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0914061860
• ISBN-13: 978-0914061861
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.1 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,928,417 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars Life during peacetime., June 28, 2005

By 

Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Million Dollar Hole (Paperback)

Michael Casey, The Million Dollar Hole (Orchises Press, 2002)

Michael Casey returns with another book of military-fueled poetry, thirty years after the buzzsaw that was Obscenities, which was chosen for the 1972 Yale Series of Younger Poets award (and remains, to my knowledge, the best-selling volume in the history of that august series). It would likely be somewhat flip to compare Casey to James Jones, but I kept coming back to the comparison; where Obscenities was Casey's The Thin Red Line, The Million Dollar Hole is From Here to Eternity, but without Deborah Kerr around.

This is the military in peacetime, the day-to-day life that is both boon and bane to soldiers who aren't off fighting a war. Casey captures the underlying sentiments all to well. When his vets reminisce, the reader can hear both the vestiges of terror and the paradoxical ghost of a wish that there were still action to be had. (One of the characters in this book, in fact, seems to find ways to bring the action back to the hinterlands of Missouri, and the reaction by his comrades is a perfect mirror to that of soldiers remembering the scarier moments that shadowed the face of Obscenities.)

Casey wears the heart of the Beats on his sleeve, and the book's shortcoming is hat, at times, it bleeds a little too much. The Beats could write novels, but the poetry they turned out was often gut-churningly bad; it's little wonder to any discerning reader of poetry that the really good poets working in the era distanced themselves from the Beats as far and as fast as possible (the obvious example here being Charles Bukowski). While Casey is a far better poet than any of the lot, there is still at times a little too much of an echo of the prosaic. Don't let that stop you from reading this; hopefully, there are enough of the legions who bought Obscenities still buying poetry to make this into another major seller. Just be prepared for a little lag now and again amidst the otherwise fine work. ** ½

4.0 out of 5 stars "Obscenities," Part 2, October 7, 2002

By 

Stephen Sossaman (San Francisco CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Million Dollar Hole (Paperback)

The Publishers Weekly review here is very perceptive. This book is a series of anecdotes about military police life at Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri, small narratives that might be overheard at a tavern, in a casual, aloof, bemused, and emotionally distant voice. There is a Charles Bukowski air here. Thus the style of these poems is very much like those in Casey's other two books, Obscenities and Millrat. This emotional distance, in my opinion, helps keep Obscenities among the most illuminating books of poetry by Viet Nam veterans. The average soldier's sentiment and experience is probably better represented by Obscenities than by the more introspective and intense poems by some better known veteran poets. Although I am in general bored by Casey's style of poetry, Michael Casey writes wonderfully. In The Million Dollar Hole, the puzzle of figuring out where the quotation marks and punctuation marks might belong is pleasant, not annoying. To assay two college creative classes' tastes, I asked which of four unlike poems (whose authors I did not reveal) they liked best. A poem from this collection was the favorite in both classes.