Customer Reviews

Permanent Party

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It is no secret that I'm a big fan of Michael Casey's work. I think it is probably because my mother read a lot of the dialect poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar (who was from my home town, Dayton OH) and James Whitcomb Riley (the "Hoosier Poet") to me as a kid, and endowed me with an ear for it -- as well as a delight in it. This Massachusetts working-class patois is Casey's niche. It can't be easy to catch the exact tone, the exact weight of each sentence, each phrase, to say nothing of the inevitable surprise "wrap up" of each poem. "Oh! That's what we were really talking about." He's a lucky writer to have found his own voice, even luckier to have mastered it. There's something else going on here, too. I've read a great deal of war poetry. After a while, it all starts sounding the same -- which is not to devalue the experience of the poets by any means -- it's just that they all go to the same well for their vocabulary and the way they put it together and end up speaking of the deepest personal things in a uniformly olive-drab way. Casey has put the extra effort necessary into finding an immediately attractive way to talk about his Vietnam experience through dialect poetry, and the net effect is all the more profoundly personal to the reader. Don't let the 31 page length discourage you; this book is a treasure. You should own it.

Like Michael Casey's other books, this collects a series of amusing free verse poems in the form of casually told, sometimes deceptively simple, anecdotes related by an unpretentious working class guy. Like Casey's other books, this is best read not as individual poems but as a collection about a small group of people. In Permanent Party, as in his recent Raiding a Whorehouse, the events involve daily life for military policemen at Ft. Leonard Wood during the Viet Nam War. As always, Casey avoids the dramatic and the overblown in favor of the unheroic quotidian. His characters, some of whom appear in more than one poem, are given to horseplay, rough humor, and emotional detachment. Those characters are Vietnam-era Sad Sacks. Michael Casey marvelously captures voices here in pastiches of unlettered speech, fragments of military phraseology, and slang. As always, Casey shrewdly exploits dramatic irony and manages to create artful poems that appear to be artless.