Customer Reviews

Pointing at the Moon

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I rarely come across a book of poems as fast-paced and gripping as Bill Wunder's collection of Vietnam War poems, Pointing at the Moon (WordTech Editions, 2008). In sharply seen, often harrowing poems, Wunder, himself a Vietnam vet (he was an aircraft mechanic) follows his speaker, Lonnie, and Lonnie's platoon through a tour of duty. Often movie-like in their visual, dramatic, and atmospheric effects, Wunder's poems recount horrific nights in the jungle, the soldiers' constant fear on incoming fire, and much more in eerie narratives about the guys in the platoon.

Some of the men who roam through these poems are mean like the psychopathic Donaldson, who is a "hand grenade,/pin pulled." Another fellow is a jinx to the platoon. And then there is Ignacio, who is estranged from his woman in the States and who has committed certain atrocities in war, but who eventually encounters a landmine and steps off it "into explosive oblivion."

Some of the most poignant poems have to do with leaving for duty and returning home. In "Freedom Bird," a homeward-bound soldier gets served by a stewardess in makeup and hairspray, but the soldier is caught in the surreal changeover., "How/can they extract us from the bush/one day, send us home the next? How/will it feel to shift through the gears on my Malibu again?"

Wunder has a special affinity for climate, weather, and air imagery. He describes New Year's Eve being "ninety degrees at midnight" and sees "tracers flow/like liquid neon/over the darkened swamp." These poems are vivid and dramatic. Their language is straighforward, but their emotional effects are complex.

Because I was born in the late 1950s, I missed ("was spared" is more like it) the ordeal of serving in the military during the Vietnam conflict. That's why I'm grateful to writers like Bill Wunder who, through the use of precise language and rich, evocative imagery, are able to convey the harrowing experiences of war without sensationalism or cheap sentimentality.

In Pointing at the Moon, Wunder specializes in compelling closing lines that resonate in readers' minds long after they have put his poems aside. Consider these lines in "Cowboy," a poem about a young soldier who, in his spare time, hones the blade of his knife, considers the collection of human ears he strings on fishing line, and prays, "God,/allow me the strength to slay our enemies./I leave it to you to show them mercy."

The theme of weather comes up frequently in Wunder's poems: the weather outside, with its sweltering jungle humidity, monsoon rains, and mud ("the soft squishy/kind that invites you in, sucks you deep down,/steals a boot when someone pulls you out"); and the inner weather of the young, who must endure the unpredictable horrors of a war that will alter their lives forever. In "Nothing Heroic," the speaker has learned to endure rash and eating meals out of tin cans, but "can't stop/staring at the shape of feet sticking up inside body bags." That image, it is suggested, will stay with the speaker long after he leaves Vietnam--if he is lucky enough to make it home alive.

Throughout the book I was struck by the soldiers' struggles to relate to fathers and mothers--in the foreign world of Vietnam, and even later, when they return home to their families. In "Rice Bugs," Papa-san smiles through rotted teeth as he introduces the poem's speaker to the peasant delicacy of biting the heads off rice bugs to extract the rice inside. The old woman in "Mama-san" "jabbers over a dented, black steel pot" and wears "the same stained black, silk pajamas/and pointy, sun-bleached hat." She becomes a familiar-looking figure, but never learns the soldiers' names. Later, in the poem "Homecoming," the speaker uses the kind of coarse, profane soldiers' language that casts an unbearable tension around the family dinner table.

Pointing at the Moon reads like a taut, well-paced novel. Wunder takes the reader through basic training, the war itself, and then homecoming. With most books of poetry I skip around, moving from section to section. With Pointing at the Moon, however, I read cover to cover--the way I would with any compelling narrative I resist putting down.

Bill Wunder's "Pointing..." is gritty and visceral, evoking images that are more felt than seen, such as the heat and wetness of the jungle environment that permeates the pages of the book, often times encouraging the reader to wipe his brow. On the other hand, sound plays a key role in many of the poems, like when a puddle of gasoline "brummfs into flames/" or when we hear dogtags "clink," even above the whine of incoming shells or the roar of Phantom jets. Also, Wunder portrays many characters in the poems, including the speaker, in such a relatable, raw light, that one can't help but feel that any one of them could be a friend or neighbor currently fighting overseas in another modern war. All these elements, and more, are pulled together in a series of poems that can be enjoyed separately, or as a whole, by almost anyone, because Wunder's poems are very readable, rarely venturing into the abstract, which allows most readers to ascertain meaning and understanding in almost every poem.

Prolific author and Pushcart nominee Bill Wunder brings his expertise to reader's eyes in "Pointing to the Moon". A Vietnam Veteran, Wunder reflects on his times and the atrocities he has witnessed and the poignant sights he has seen throughout the conflict. "Pointing to the Moon" is worth a poetry fan's time. "Sniper": It's not the tap-tap-tap/of the dead sniper's blood//dripping. Not the electric hum//of excited flies/drawn to his wounds.//Not the shrill caw/of a Green Hornbill complaining,/that awakens/me at 3 am.//It's the sniper's face, mouth/wide open, trying to//breathe back/his last gasp.

I had the pleasure of listening to Bill Wunder read his exquisite poems from his Vietnam War experience in various venues in the Pennsylvania-New Jersey area. These poems are now collected in this 86-page volume I read in one sitting a day after my signed copy arrived in the mail.

No wonder the poems garnered numerous prizes. The poet puts us right there in the tragically shattered land of Vietnam. We sit with real-life characters - whether with the doomed soldiers so very young (ah Ignacio, Kleinhsasser, Cowboy with his necklace of trophy ears)- the sad eyes of the Vietnamese elders - and the beauty of the women "red lips so vibrant the bougainvillea she passes shrinks its blooms."

The language is simple, a poetically-wrought live journal that tells us 40 years later of nearly everything we need to know about Vietnam. The book's inscription makes a futile plea to his children of what Bill Wunder learned most of all: "the hope that your generation does not make the mistakes of mine." The poet never would have believed as he slept out in "humid, jungle nights" under "innumerable stars" that 40 years hence the fate of the world is worse than in the dread years of Vietnam.

Yet, somehow, reading this account of what it is to be a high school graduate from Levittown, PA, who joined the Army because there was nothing better to do, we see Wunder's tremendous humanity forged in this terrible war. The book ends as a celebration of the small and easy things in life and brings to each reader the taken-for-granted pleasures of a simple breakfast of eggs and coffee.