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the fury and the mire 

As with the war poems of earlier wars, many of Balaban’s best were written after
theguns had fallen silent, for example:

In Celebration of Spring

Our Asian war is over; others have begun.

Our elders, who tried to mortgage lies,

are disgraced, or dead, and already

the brokers are picking their pockets

for the keys and the credit cards.

In delta swamp in a united Vietnam,

a Marine with a bullfrog for a face,

rots in equatorial heat. An eel

slides through the cage of his bared ribs.

At night, on the old battlefield, ghosts,

like patches of fog, lurk into villages

to maunder on doorsills of cratered homes,

whileallacrosstheU.S.A.

the wounded walk about and wonder where to go.

And today, in the simmer of lyric sunlight,

the chrysalis pulses in its mushy cocoon,

under the bark on a gnarled root of an elm.

In the brilliant creek, a minnow flashes

delirious with gnats. The turtle’s heart

quickens its raps in the warm bank sludge.

As she chases a frisbee spinning in sunlight,

a girl’s breasts bounce full and strong;

a boy’s stomach, as he turns, is flat and strong.^18

Balaban’s opening has disturbing vibrations for readers in 2004: ‘Our Asian war
is over; others have begun.’ As for Owen and Sassoon, the guilty men are the
old men who sacrificed the young—‘Our elders who tried to mortgage lies’.
Scavenging vermin in America—‘the brokers’—anticipate the somehow more
attractive scavengers in Vietnam—the bullfrog and the eel. The controlled fury of
the speaker’s first stanza is followed by pity for the dead of both sides, and for the
living dead. There is not much celebration ‘on the old battlefield’ or ‘across the
U.S.A.’, but with the third stanza, spring returns and the natural cycle of generation
begins again: the ‘chrysalispulses’, ‘a minnowflashes’, ‘the turtle’s heart|quickens’.
And not only the turtle’s heart: ‘a girl’s breasts bounce full and strong;|aboy’s
stomach, as he turns, is flat and strong’. Adam and Eve are in their garden again.
Finally, as at the end of Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ and Cornford’s ‘Letter from
Aragon’, Balaban turns from hisexemplato address his reader directly:

(^18) John Balaban, ‘In Celebration of Spring’, inLocusts at the Edge of Summer: New and Selected
Poems(Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 1997), 108–9.