
Apostle of Desire
Description
Taking its cue from James Wright's goal to write, "the poetry of a grown man," the poems in Apostle of Desire juxtapose the peace and comfort offered by the natural world with the bruising intensity of manmade violence. These sudden tonal shifts express a vulnerability and extremity of feeling that strips audiences' own emotions bare, leading readers to question their roles as bystanders and consumers of violent media.
In sharing his intertwining feelings of love and shame for both country and self, Weigl places readers into the role of the watcher and opens a window into the traumas of the Vietnam War and life's daily battles with PTSD. The honesty of Weigl's poetry exposes the ghosts of pain while still witnessing the glories of love, nature, and his ongoing experiences with the rich daily life of contemporary Vietnam.
Readers will face the solitude of regret and the hopeful pursuit of redemption-remembering the past and looking toward the future.
Reviews / Votes
"Bruce Weigl's 15th collection of poetry, Apostle of Desire, reminds me what people were feeling in 1968, blood in our streets and in the streets of Vietnam, where your brother, father, son-or you-faced deadly combat. Weigl was an 18-year old Ohio soldier who saw and participated in unshakable human damage. He became, afterward, the preeminent poet of the experience Americans have tried for decades to dodge. From the start, his poetry's love of country, and outrage at our failed national morality, echoed Whitman and Melville; the shock and despair those giants turned into art, their pleas for the future. Apostle of Desire is Bruce Weigl's chronicle of how one veteran has carried on a singular postwar detente, including intense and multiple returns to Vietnam and years spent engaging its culture, life, citizens, shrines, dreams, and especially poets, translating and publishing them in the US, marrying the two languages as redemption. His stories of how it felt to come home a pariah and a hero, depending on who was talking, compose a hard misery that has not yet ended, but his mature poetry becomes a celebration of Vietnam's rivers, mists, flowers, hand-holding lovers, children, and abundant and joyful human-ness. Weigl's poems are-make no mistake-tough, unflinching, and demanding in his quest for self-reclamation. That's what our country trained him to be. But what most stands out in Apostle of Desire is a kind of holiness like the songs of monks, and that barbed, witty, lonesome knowledge only deeply examined experience provides. Whitman's. Melville's. I think Apostle of Desire is what poet James Wright meant when he said he wanted to write the poetry of a grown man. This complex, serious book is about American conduct. It is grown-up and splendid."-Dave Smith, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Hunting Men: Reflections on a Life in American PoetryMore details
Person
Content
To the Reader
My Corona Landslide
Loving the Jungle Blues
Tender Lotus
The Preponderance of the Great Splitting Apart,
(Homage to Emily D.)
Mưa Xuân
Written the Day Mr. X Left Prison
Thinking About Her
Outside of Quảng Trị City, 1968
All that I Need
Verse Thirteen
Evening Before Desire in Hà Nội
Victim of Love
The First Time I Heard Your Name it was Different
Autumn, End of Everything
Attending a Meeting of High Officials
The Dangers of Searching the Photographs of Renato Sandoval
Sky
Epistolary to a Brother
How Odd Our Grief
The New Road Neighborhood Showdown
Empty
A Simple Lesson
Why I Love my Doctor
Here I am
My Bill Evans
Small Autumn Festival Song for Xia Lu
Loving the Thai Binh River Ghosts
The Quality of Mental Health Care at the VA
The Inevitability of Things
Why I Flunked Philosophy 301
Being and Listening
Waiting for my Father’s Bus
Bodies
Tôi đi bộ quanh hồ Hà Lê
Weight of Rain
The Ambiguity of his Intentions
Apostle of Desire
Homage to the Gecko
Saying Goodbye to Achill
A Vision
Uvalde
The Names of Loss in English
I Went Mental
For Bella, Dancing
An English Novel
Whoever They Were
The Lake Will Take You Home
Monk at Trấn Quốc Pagoda
The History of the Blues in Hà Nội
Hồ Gươm Romance
Hàng Khay Rain
Hồ Gươm Moment
Our Fear of Hồ Gươm
Berserk
Now, Unattached
Some Words for my Grandchildren
Marching with the Dead on Bà Triệu
A Brief Epistemology of Longing
The Priority of Paradigms for Her
In the Presence of Sympathetic Ghosts
Dark Barges Churn the River White in the Moon
Meditation at Bao Vinh Among Roses
What Nhung Wrote Down
Temporal Reality Take Out for A.
Red Bridge on Hoan Kiem Lake
Night Message, From a Friend
Going Back
An Ars Poetica
Notes