Of The Moon Reflected Fire and its subject, the Vietnam War, poet James Tate writes: "These are trenchant, wrenching poems. With artistry and honesty they perform an inquest into war and its corrosive after effects."
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"Doug Anderson is one of the bravest poets I know, utterly uncompromising. His language brims with compassion, rage, tenderness and pain. The Vietnam war is his primary subject, rendered here with a startling clarity of image and understanding, a wrenching intimacy born of experience. Anderson is cursed and blessed with memory, and his considerable poetic gift assures that we will not forget, either." -- Martin Espada
"Richard Burton said his father was famous as a miner because he could see the character of the coal. He would look at the face a bit, then hit it hard in the right spot, and tons of coal would fall down. I don't know if the story is true, but I know it's true of these poems about that war." -- Jack Gilbert
"These are trenchant, wrenching poems. With artistry and honesty they perform an inquest into war and its corrosive after effects." -- James Tate
"What is perhaps most striking about Doug Anderson's The Moon Reflected Fire is the poet's ability to have found forms to contain experiences most of us would not even be able to acknowledge let alone embrace. He has constructed these forms with what might be called a lyrical narration wherein the poems are driven not simply by a linear telling of events, but by a careful layering of consciousness as well." -- Bruce Weigl
"Richard Burton said his father was famous as a miner because he could see the character of the coal. He would look at the face a bit, then hit it hard in the right spot, and tons of coal would fall down. I don't know if the story is true, but I know it's true of these poems about that war." -- Jack Gilbert
"These are trenchant, wrenching poems. With artistry and honesty they perform an inquest into war and its corrosive after effects." -- James Tate
"What is perhaps most striking about Doug Anderson's The Moon Reflected Fire is the poet's ability to have found forms to contain experiences most of us would not even be able to acknowledge let alone embrace. He has constructed these forms with what might be called a lyrical narration wherein the poems are driven not simply by a linear telling of events, but by a careful layering of consciousness as well." -- Bruce Weigl
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More About the Author
Doug Anderson has written two books of poems of which The Moon Reflected Fire won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and Blues for Unemployed Secret Police a grant from the Eric Matthieu King Fund of the Academy of American Poets. His play, Short Timers, was produced at New York's The Theater for The New City in 1981. He has written film scripts, fiction and criticism and is at present at work on a novel about human trafficking. He earned a Phd from the University of Connecticut and teaches at the Hartford campus. His awards include fellowships from the NEA, the Virginia Quarterly Review, Poets & Writers, Inc., The Massachusetts Artists Foundations, The MacDowell Colony and other funding organizations. His work has appeared in Poetry, The Massachusetts Review, The Connecticut Review, The Southern Review, Ploughshares and many other literary magazines.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This book will stay with you.,
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This review is from: The Moon Reflected Fire (Paperback)
This isn't just some of the best poetry from the Viet Nam war. It's some of the best war poetry ever written--not just for the truths it tells, but also for the power and craft of the telling, and its generous range. Anderson brings the brutality of war into vivid relief against the setting in which it occurs:The way he made that corpse dance/ by emptying one magazine after another into it/ and the way the corpse's face began to peel off/ like a mask because the skull had been shattered, brains/ spilled out, but he couldn't stop killing that corpse. A treeline opens into paddies/quartered by dikes, a moon in each,/ and in the center, the hedged island of a village/ floats in its own time, ribboned with smoke. Someone is cooking fish./ Whispers move across the water. He tells of soldiers during lulls before combat: Things live in my hair. I do not bathe./ I have thrown away my underwear./ I have forgotten the why of everything./ I sense an indifference larger than anything/ I know. All that will remain of us/ is rusting metal disappearing in vines... A black snake slides off the paddy dike/ into the water and makes the moon shiver. He tells of combat: the man in front of me steps on a mine,/loses both legs at the hip, and that's not all... And a survivor's life back home: I'm like a country who can't remember the last war./ Well, that's not strictly true./ It's just been too long./ Too long and my heart is like/ a house for sale in a lot full of weeds... Used to be I'd get a bottle/ and drink until the lights went out/ but now I carry my pain around everywhere I go/ because I'm afraid/ I might put it down somewhere and lose it./ I've grown tender about my mileage. Besides all of that there are marvelous poems on Goya's `Disasters of War', a wonderful sequence of replies to Homer, and much more. The Moon Reflected Fire is a masterful, important book of astonishing depth
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Light in Dark Times,
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This review is from: The Moon Reflected Fire (Paperback)
The Moon Reflected Fire: PoemsI am not a poet. But I have a poet trapped somewhere inside me. A not uncommon condition. And that poet often returns to Doug Anderson's poems for nurture and hope. A turning point in human prehistory was when our ancestors learned not merely to manage fire but to create it. In dark times like these we need someone who knows how to strike one word against another and create flame, light, warmth. Doug Anderson's poems in The Moon Reflected Fire are like that, struck from darkness, casting light, giving off the body-and-soul heat of human recognition.
5.0 out of 5 stars
excellent poetic review of combat and its fallout,
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This review is from: The Moon Reflected Fire (Paperback)
As a combat wounded Viet Nam vet, myself, I found this book of poetry to be a statement of understanding and camaraderie. I have been writing poetry for decades (including two published books of poetry) and was impressed with this work. I even wrote a poem in response to this book.
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