Iowa Author Set’s Ghosts Free
by: Matthew Hundley
Three generations of combat leave their scars on a family. Vince Gotera reveals some of the family wounds in his latest collection of poetry “Ghost Wars.”
Often times we had to wait for the wounds or past wars to be revealed. With today’s lightning fast media coverage we hear the stories direct from the front of our soldiers physically and mentally scarred from skirmishes in the Middle East.
Through Vince Gotera’s poetry we get first hand insight into the blight that war can bring into the family. And of the wounds that reveal themselves after wartime.
So who is Vince Gotera? In the university community he is known for his work as an editor for the North American Review and as an English professor at the University of Northern Iowa. Gotera is also a Vietnam veteran, as well as the granson, son and brother of combat veterans from Vietnam and World War II.
The collection opens with a young soldier on guard duty in Viet Nam “hoping no hostile sapper is cutting through / barbed wire, bayonet and grenades tied / to his waist.” He closes in a hope that “young women and men should dream of breezes in tress, soft rain, sunshine.” Not of oncoming hordes of enemy soldiers.
In the poem “Refusal to Write an Elegy” a suicide pulls into view remembrances of a father’s stories from wartime. What drove this poem home for me is the stanza that goes:
Papa, when you watch tv,
you hammer your fist into your thigh.
Nailing yourself to the morning. To the yellow
heart of an egg, sunny side up.
These are not uplifting tales. Not always for the faint at heart.
”A Soldier’s Letter” is a poem about a brother who is lost in life. Goes to Viet Nam. And comes back even more the lost child who live’s in his “father’s house, alternating between gay baars on Castro and the VA hospital psych ward.”
From his own experiences from the firing lines in Viet Nam to observances of the wars that fill our news channels today. Terrorist acts in ’85, the Gulf War, 9-11.
Airliners made into missiles by men of Al Qaeda,
Fireballs, falling buildings, ash…eclipsing love
in what was then, after all, already a scary time
For those of us who have not experienced war – nor have direct contact with family members who have – these poems give us a taste of the pain and pleasure that war brings about.
The collection again is called, “Ghost Wars” by Vince Gotera. This book is available through Final Thursday Press. Online at http://geocities.com/finalthursdaypress
Posted: December 25, 2004  
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