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| The Stick Soldiers
ISBN: 9781938160073
Platform/Publisher: Ebook Central / BOA Editions Ltd.
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Limited; Download: 7 Days at a Time
Subjects: Literature;
Martin served with the U.S. Army in Iraq between 2003 and 2005; his solid, sad verse debut chronicles that experience, along with the months before and the years after. Stateside training generates some of his strangest, harshest poems, including a prose anecdote that might describe a murder. Time back at home, in snowy Ohio, prompts alienated, ambivalent regret, comparable at best to Randall Jarrell's poems on World War II airmen and veterans. Yet the bulk of the book, and its reason for being, involve Martin's time in Iraq. Sand gets everywhere, IEDs could be anywhere, children are sources at once of pathos and danger, and camaraderie is all-important. "We avoid trash, disturbed soil, animal carcasses./ We arrest men// who dig beside the road./ We hate the ground." Some pages portray other soldiers, grim, friendly, naive: "Smith, shirtless, curls forty-pound dumbbells,/ part of his plan for home:// a sex life." Other sentences take on the scenes and the moments of combat: "You aim. Your first shot./ But the truck slows. When you adjust, your foot slips,/ you fall below the edge, unable to see." Now a Stegner Fellow at Stanford, Martin breaks little new ground in the craft of verse. What he offers instead-along with the very few other Iraq war poets (Brian Turner, for example) noticed so far-are thoughtful recollections, scary memories, articulate reflections, and the resolve of a man who has been there. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Hugh Martin is a graduate of Muskingum University and completed his MFA at Arizona State in May, 2012. He served six years in the Army National Guard as an M1A1 Tanker and spent 11 months in Iraq. His poetry centers on the narratives that crossed his path as a soldier, with a goal "to make each section vivid and strong enough to give the reader a clear idea of what each soldier is like as a human being."
Martin's work has appeared in CONSEQUENCE Magazine, Mid-American Review, Nashville Review, and is forthcoming in Gargoyle, Third Coast, and the American Poetry Review. His chapbook, So, How Was the War? (Kent State UP, 2010) was published by the Wick Poetry Center, and was selected as part of the 7th Avenue Streetscape Series in downtown Phoenix, Arizona. In the summer of 2011 he taught introductory creative writing classes at the National University of Singapore. He will be a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University in the fall of 2012. |
