The Looking House: Poems
Marchant remains best known for his poems against war: he left the Marines as a conscientious objector, the first officer to do so during the Vietnam War. Marchant (Tipping Point) remembers in this third book how his service troubled him and registers his dissent from more recent wars in energetic lines. He devotes more space, though, to more general lessons: like the squirrels in the pine, he writes, I would teach my heart how to be a heart. Marchant has long cherished connections to Ireland and to Irish poetry: I loved the sweet silence of hay as it cured on an Irish farm, he says, and the labor too,/ the mowing and tossing,// letting grass breathe itself dry. Like William Stafford—the influential American pacifist poet, whose poems Marchant edited—Marchant can see himself as a spiritual teacher, recording his struggles to set an example: he is most interesting when those struggles fail, and the poems present not wisdom but frustration—at the senseless illness of his sister, at nature (the whorl of planets, a gristly wheel of trees), at the frantic,/ grinding inability to attend/ to anything but sere thwarting/ of yourself.(June)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.