Customer Reviews

The Million Dollar Hole

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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

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.