WAR SONGS is a collection of poems written by Dr Grady Harp while serving as a Battalion Surgeon with the USMC in Vietnam 1968-69. Some 25 years after the poems were written Harp collaborated with clay artist Stephen Freedman to make the written poems visual in the form of sculpted, metaphorical clay vessels. This book is a catalogue which traveled with that exhibition.
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Editorial Reviews
Review
Karla Powell: "Grady Harp's war monuments" -- Chicago Reader, September 11, 1997
Margaret Hawkins: "Vietnam surgeon heals himself through his sculpture, poetry." -- Chicago Sun-Times, August 29, 1997
Translation of WAR SONGS in Spanish with review -- 20 de Mayo, 4 and 11 October, 1997
Margaret Hawkins: "Vietnam surgeon heals himself through his sculpture, poetry." -- Chicago Sun-Times, August 29, 1997
Translation of WAR SONGS in Spanish with review -- 20 de Mayo, 4 and 11 October, 1997
From the Publisher
Poetry is a condensation of experience, of emotion, and of personal statement that can become universal in its application. In these War Songs the poet reveals the healing power of confronting pain through making it visible in poetic form.
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More About the Author
Grady Harp is the Reviewer for POETS and ARTISTS magazine and writes for other publications as well. He is the Art Historian for the quarterly journal THE ART OF MAN and he has provided chapters and introductions to numerous books such as the recent Powerfully Beautiful and !00 Artists of the Male Figure . His essays and articles will appear in two major books on art in 2011 that will be distributed internationally. His poetry appears in the monograph entitled WAR SONGS: Metaphors in Clay and Poetry from the Vietnam Experience, a publication that accompanied a two year traveling exhibition, INCONVENIENT STORIES: Vietnam War Veterans by Jeffrey Wolin, in Poetry: The First 10 Years of the New Millennium: GRADY HARP by Didi Menendez (http://goss183.wordpress.com/2010/01/16/grady-harp/), 50/50 Words and Images for Didi Menendez, and others. As an art gallerist he has presented premiere artists from throughout the world for such exhibitions as WADE REYNOLDS: Full Circle Retrospective, BODY LANGUAGE: Current Figurative Painters, INDOMITABLE SPIRITS: The Figure at the End of the Century and MEMENTO MORI: Contemporary Still Life. He has produced exhibitions for the Arnot Art Museum in New York, Fresno Museum of Art, Nevada Museum of Art, National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum in Chicago, and Cleveland State University Art Gallery and has served as a contributing artistic advisor for universities and colleges throughout California, in Berlin, the Centro Cultural de Conde Duque in Madrid, and in Oslo, Norway. Grady lives in Los Angeles, CA.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
152 of 154 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A survival kit in words,
By FrKurt Messick "FrKurt Messick" (Bloomington, IN USA) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE) (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER) (TOP 500 REVIEWER)
This review is from: War songs: Metaphors in clay and poetry from the Vietnam experience (Paperback)
The year was 1968. A sensitive soul, a man whose vocation had become settled on helping and healing people, was thrust into the midst of one of the worst, most ambiguous conflicts in modern warfare history. Dr. Grady Harp, a young man himself, was sent to Vietnam as a physician to help men even younger who faced harrowing and desperate situations, losing life and limb as well as spirit as the carnage wore on. How does a healing soul survive?
My first reading of Harp's poetry, coupled in this book with wonderful pictures of creations by Stephen Freedman, a South African artist working in clay, was a mesmerizing experience. The emotions are deep, thoughtful, and occasionally as raw as the unshaped clay Freedman uses; the word-smith skill applied by Harp is as polished as Freedman's final products. The reader gets to see both linguistic and physical art being developed here, work that both pays tribute to and exposes the horrors faced by men in a conflict so long ago and far away. According to Harp, 'These poems represent one physician's survival kit in Vietnam.' It took twenty years for these to see the light of day in publication. There are twenty poems here, perhaps a meaningful convergence of numbers that it took twenty years for these twenty poems to surface for the world to see and absorb. The images and feelings are those that cannot be repressed by anyone reading them - how much more then by him who experienced them first? The gamut of human emotion, hope and fear is contained in this physically thin but soulfully deep text, and perhaps that too is a concrete example of how thin the veneer of civilisation and sanity can be, particularly in situations involving absolute death and destruction. The pictures of Freedman's clay work, emblazoned with the words from Harp's poetry, doubling as a presentation of the words on the page, all done in a stark but stylish black-and-white format (ironic, that, given that the underlying conflict was in many ways anything but a black-and-white situation) makes for an astonishing wandering through the minefield of human aspiration and despair, hope and loss, and ultimately, survival. A great work by a great poet, and a great soul.
128 of 129 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"the indescribable horror of war",
By H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin" (ATLANTA, GA USA) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE) (TOP 500 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
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This review is from: War songs: Metaphors in clay and poetry from the Vietnam experience (Paperback)
Grady Harp has written 20 poems about his experience as a physician in Vietnam-- a place that few Americans could have found on a map if their lives had depended on it before that awful ill-fated war that still haunts us. It appears that Harp wrote them with no thought of ever having them published. (We are grateful he did, however.) He says in an eloquent essay that he wrote the poems as a diary: "If I could arrange the day's events in poetic form, my attention could be focused on the poem, resolving form and verse while actual atrocities could be codified, then put away for now, allowing me to go on." Mr. Harp's collaborator is the potter Stephen Freedman who is photographed creating clay pieces that make a statement, as he says in his essay, in "the only language I know well enough to communicate emotion this close to the souls of all of us."
Accessible and short, the poems often start with a harmless enough image, soldiers having a beer, a comrade talking, a "happy laugh," and end with devastation and death. I have read these poems again and again. Two of them are seared in my brain: Number 16, about a favorite Vietnamese nurse who "wasted all her patients with a stolen M16" and Number 12 that shows so much compassion. Like all good poetry, it speaks for itself and is much better read than paraphrased. War makes you do such things as keeping an IV running on a dead body all night so his neighboring wounded buddy won't give up until he can be MedEvaced to a field hospital the next lonely morning. I heard a lot of one-way conversations at night in Vietnam. While these poems may have been written to keep one army physician sane, they speak to the universal: the awfulness of war, the suffering and dying of men just about to live and of course are as relevant in 2007, almost 40 years later, as the day they were written. They rise to the level of fine literature and deserve to be compared to the writing of Walt Whitman and Rupert Brooke, both of whose works I thought of when I read Mr. Harp's poems.
90 of 90 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
THIS BOOK IS IN A PLACE OF HONOR IN OUR HOUSE ...,
A Kid's Review
This review is from: War songs: Metaphors in clay and poetry from the Vietnam experience (Paperback)
My Dad has this book beside the Bible on the mantle in our living room. He tells the story of how this book brought him back to life after he was in the Army in Vitnam.
He was so messed up after the war, he couldn't get a good job. He was a truck driver and it used to hurt his back. Then he worked at a computer store ... all dead-end jobs, he says. Nine years ago, he found your book and it helped him get the help he needed. He got a good job, got married and had me a year later. I'm learning to use the computer now, so that's why I waited so long to thank you guys for righting such a good book that helps peeple. I can't give my real name, but you can call me Meatball.
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