‘After our War’: John Balaban’s Poetic Images of Vietnam

Abstract

Reading William Ehrhart’s excellent 1985 anthology of Vietnam War poetry, Carrying the Darkness: American Indo-China — the Poetry of the Vietnam War, one is struck by an overall similarity of theme and style.¹ Poem after poem embodies common attitudes, shared cultural perspectives and what seems to be an identical use of language. The dominant viewpoint naturally enough is that of the soldier whose poems recall the time he spent in occupied Vietnam. A whole plethora of poems reiterate the traditional litanies of warfare: the rites of passage from callow recruit through combat and back to an uncaring United States. The war is portrayed as a terrible ordeal, a version of hell. Clearly many fine poems are included in Ehrhart’s anthology, by such poets as Ehrhart himself, Walter McDonald, Gerald McCarthy, Basil T. Paquet and Jan Barry; their work exhibits great variety and difference, of course, and there is no monolithic ‘school’ of Vietnam War poetry.