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The Return

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The Return is an epic poem by Frederick Turner, first published in book form in 1981. It begins in the imaginary Southeast Asian country of the Revolutionary People's Democracy of Mei Lin shortly after the departure of American troops. The parallels with the Vietnam War are intentional. Indeed, the poem powerfully evokes the period of the late sixties-early seventies. A British poet and professor, Turner came to the United States in 1967 and taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Those were the days of student protests against the Vietnam War and so Turner observed, first-hand, the politics of the time. However The Return is not overtly political; instead, Turner offers the poem as a healing balm to those troubled times.

The Return is eminently readable. Like the works of Homer and Virgil, The Return is filled with colorful characters and exciting action. The poem begins by recounting the adventures of a pair of young American journalists as they venture into the chaos of war-torn, post-revolutionary Mei Lin. It develops that Blanche Yin and the unnamed male narrator are working undercover on behalf of The People's Revolutionary Government. The revolutionaries employed drug lords to undermine the U.S. war effort by making heroin available to American troops to sap their morale. With the departure of the Americans, the government no longer has use for the heroin producers. The journalists' mission is to infiltrate one of the drug-producing camps and leak the story to the press. They are assigned to meet with a drug lord named the General. The plan backfires when he captures them and orders them injected them with high-quality heroin to place them in his control. They escape when the General's aides mutiny and assassinate him.

Blanche and the narrator find themselves facing an odyssey in a lawless, devastated country filled with scattered fighting and fleeing refugees. Through many adventures they escape Mei Lin and cross into China. Hounded by Chinese authorities, they escape to the comparative safety of Burma (currently Myanmar). There, they are given sanctuary in a monastery where they are taught in the ways of meditation. In one memorable sequence, the narrator achieves enlightenment, an ecstatic experience of expanded consciousness presented in the manner of The Upanishads.

Like Odysseus struggling to return home to Ithaca, Blanche and the narrator fight to get back to the United States. In their odyssey, they fall in love, she becomes pregnant, and finally they arrive home. While the early sections of the poem present their exciting adventures in Southeast Asia, its real subject is their return.

Early in the poem the narrator states, "Sometimes I miss America like a fever,"sounding a keynote of The Return. The America he and Blanche miss is stolidly middle class and material, yet Turner mocks neither the middle class nor materialism. In Homeric catalogues he celebrates "the bourgeois trivia of capitalism:/the smell of a new house, fresh drywall, resin/adhesive, vinyl, new hammered studs." His characters find comfort and stability in the quotidian world. The poem celebrates many features of ordinary life: Bach on the radio, "Morning coffee in the kitchen," a halved grapefruit. These commonplace elements are the "glory of the bourgeois-secular." He suggests that we may find redemption in the everyday and ordinary.

The poem vividly evokes the Vietnam era. Against the background of the U.S. involvement in the Mei Linese war, we see the political upheavals of the time, the hopes of the youth culture, and the tragedies of the period. The scene of the characters' brief drug addiction suggests the ravages of the drug culture. The scenes of ecstatic enlightenment in the monastery evoke the spiritual quests of the time, which often turned to the East. Ultimately, like Odysseus, Blanche and the narrator return home and see it with new eyes, changed by their adventures. The conclusion of The Return suggests the ending of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets: "We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time."

Frederick Turner is a noted British poet, professor, and scholar, currently at the University of Texas at Dallas. He has lived in the United States since 1967. In addition to The Return, he has written the epic poems The New World and Genesis.