THE US REPORT

The Iraq war has probably spawned as many poems as Vietnam. I rarely read them, because there’s nothing worse than confessionals dying to be poems but falling short of the mark. So I was surprised at Francis Richey’s new collection, ‘The Warrior.’ The poems in the collection are not your usual run-of-the-mill anti-war poems. Instead, the poems are a sort of bridge between Richey and her son Ben, who decided at a young age he wanted to be a soldier. Richey, who’d raised her son as a single mother before doing so became common, wasn’t pleased when Ben met his goal. There’s an automatic premise of conflict with a son determined to serve and a mother dismayed that he does.

Ben graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point, became a Green Beret and went to Iraq twice. Rather than engage in wailing verses, Richey explores her feelings by tapping into her reactions to news from Ben, special occasions, even visits to museums. She expresses herself in free verse with a decidedly confessional bent, but she manages to keep her lines tight and stay on the poetry path rather than the rant path. This sets up an accessible link for the reader and rather astonishingly avoids the political abyss most war poems freefall into. It’s my impression her short lines—some include only two stressed syllables—tend  to be punchier and to deliver more impact than her long lines, but that’s a fairly common reaction for me to free verse. The poems will work on the page and on the stage, meeting a goal many poets today are unable to achieve.

My favorite in the collection is "Kill School." Richey recounts her son’s experiences learning to kill a rabbit with his bare hands, and several lines leave lasting impressions. After describing rocking the rabbit “like a baby in his arms”, Richey writes, “until every sinew surrendered/and he smashed its head into a tree.” There is the pivotal moment in this poem, very much like the turn in a formal sonnet, when Ben responds to the horror his mother conceivably felt, along with the reader—“You said you wanted to know.” That line was so remarkable in the context of the narrative, I wanted the poem to end there. That it did not evoked my comparison to a sonnet.

Richey’s book is an engaging read, and for those of us who have loved ones in the military, there will definitely be common ground in fear, admiration and anxiety. The collection’s strongest elements are admirably controlled drama and backstory. That a mother who is against a war can write about her son’s experiences with eloquence and grace goes to the heart of a mother’s love. Though we may disagree with decisions our children make, we respect those decisions and refrain from bitterness, come what may. As Memorial Day approaches, the book is an excellent gift for anyone experiencing a loved one serving in war. That young women and men like Ben are offering the ultimate sacrifice for our country is a truly remarkable act of generosity as old as mankind itself.