John Burt’s Victory is a suite of narrative poems exploring the nuances of conflict, of wins and losses, and survival. Transcending the merely lyric, these poems have the narrative depth and richness of a novella. In an age of lyrics and autobiography, Victory is unusual in the way it hews to the older traditions of narrative and storytelling.
Better by far than The Naked and the Dead by Mailer- America is graduating from prose to Poetry, thanks to a long enough legacy of peace in the middle class- not so the upper classes, who have Vietnam and ongoing wars on their conscience.