April 2001

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Full Moon Boat, Poems by Fred Marchant

Graywolf Press, 2000

Tipping Point, Fred Marchant's first collection of poetry, won the Washington Prize in 1994. Tipping Point was a book of great riches, its poems navigating the reader through the realms of weights and balances, alignments, alliances, and choices many confronted in the era of the war in Vietnam. The collection was an important one. Its title poem pivoted upon the poet's ultimate decision to file for conscientious objector status as a Marine Corps Officer in 1969, in the midst of the Vietnam War. In its meditations on the subtle and not so subtle impact of even the smallest acts of "complicity" on the world's body, Tipping Point confirmed Fred Marchant as an important voice of conscience.

In Full Moon Boat, Fred Marchant leaves behind the problematic debates of Tipping Point and steers us straight off into the wreckage of our recent wars. In this, his second volume, Marchant shows us that his work has a course and that this course has clear lines connecting him to his great predecessors, Merton, Berrigan, and Levertov.

Bomb exploding just outside of Tam Ky, Quang Tin Province, 1967. Photo © Doug Hostetter

In the poems of Full Moon Boat, Marchant presents himself as a poet with a mature vision of the universe we inhabit, a poet who wisely knows of this world's terrors and horrors, but who knows, too, the profound and potentially redeeming grace of humanity.

Many of the poems in this volume are meditations, prayers of sorts, attempts to focus our attention on what is right before us. "What would slip by stands/miraculously under the window/ hidden in a sentence, a phrase/a ground fog lifting, or is it settling?" ("Fragment on the Last Night"). Some of the finest moments in the collection include the contemplation of a homeless veteran with his shopping cart beneath the "Sister Coretta's Gas Tank," the sequence for Eric Olson, especially "Collage Piece," the poems set in Vietnam among fellow poets, and the translations with Nguyen Ba Chung of the poems of Tran Dang Khoa, Vietnam's legendary child poet during the war.

Fred Marchant differs from many of his contemporaries in his ability as a poet to stay focused on the matter of the world right before us. While other poets move, often too glibly, from image to image, Marchant stays with the image, the object, never giving up on it until he begins to hear it speak, speak to him, to the reader, to the world.

In "Bones to Hanoi," Marchant focuses all the energy of the poem on the unseen contents of a rucksack. In this poem, a former soldier returns home on a train, bearing the bones of a long-dead brother. All our attention is focused on that sack, the attempt to see "scattered at the bottom...,/ the curve of half-ribs/ that fence his toiletries, a change/ of clothing." So steady the gaze, we are even presented a check list: "Tibia, fibula/digits, vertebrae."

This act of seeing, of contemplation, in its straightforward intellectual and emotional honesty moves this poem, and all the poems of the volume, beyond a simple sentimentality or the bare act of witness, to a point of revelation, a point at which we know and feel exactly why this man "holds the rucksack bundled in his arms/ as if it were holy."

This is Marchant's great strength; it is a strength that, in its clarity of focus, allows us to see beyond our linear and secular visions into the often profound and ësacred' dimensions of human action and acts of conscience.

This is a strength that from comes from taking risks: "...What I wanted to do/ was open myself from sternum to throat/ pull out the organ of affection and learn/what it had thought to teach" ("The Meadow"). It is a strength that comes from taking on the weight of responsibility to show the pain and irony we must accept and live amidst, "burdened with the knowledge that murderers/ name their deeds after winged deities" ("The Phoenix Program").

For this risk-taking and for this fine work we owe the poet an immense debt of gratitude. Full Moon Boat offers a rich array of human moments set in the midst of often inhuman times.

--Kevin Bowen is a poet who directs the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at UMass Boston.

Previous Article    Next Article