Ribbons: The Gulf War - A Poem

by William Heyen

In this past year of “our first war in the desert” and the “amnesiac parades” which numbed our national conscience, William Heyen kept writing how the war hurt. Far from what used to be called the front lines, himself torn with Marianne Moore’s old knowledge that “there never was a war that was / not inward,” William Heyen stood watch for us all. These dark and brilliant Ribbons are, taken whole, the most self-demanding war poem of our century’s death-throes. Philip Booth

Genres: Poetry

56 pages, Audio Cassette

First published November 1, 1991

About the author

William Heyen was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1940, and raised in Suffolk County by German immigrant parents. His graduate degrees are from Ohio University. A former Senior Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature in Germany, he has been honored with NEA, Guggenheim, American Academy of Arts & Letters and other awards. His poetry has appeared in the Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper’s, American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, and in hundreds of other magazines and anthologies. His Crazy Horse in Stillness won the Small Press Book Award in 1997; Shoah Train: Poems was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2004. Heyen is Professor of English/Poet in Residence Emeritus at his undergraduate alma mater, SUNY Brockport.
Etruscan also published his September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond (2002), The Confessions of Doc Williams & Other Poems (2006), A Poetics of Hiroshima (2008), and The Football Corporations (2011).

His work has appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, The Nation,The Ontario Review, and in over one hundred anthologies. Heyen is the author of: Erika: Poems of the Holocaust; The Host: Selected Poems 1965-1990 (both Time-Being Books, 1991, 1994); Diana, Charles, & the Queen; Crazy Horse in Stillness (both from BOA Editions, Ltd, 1998, 1996), the latter of which won the 1997 National Small Press Book Award for Poetry.

Reviews

[Jennifer Collins · Rating 3 out of 5]

Often reading like something of a poetic journal more so than a poem, this work has some striking moments and comes across as frighteningly current & relevant--even more than two decades after publication. Heyen's blend of nature, 'current' events/war, and personal understanding is impressive, and a fairly powerful example of what a long poetic sequence is capable of when focused in to a particular exploration.

All told, this isn't a simple read, and it's also not as dated as it should be given the current conflicts. If you're interested in poetry that attempts some reconciliation of personal understanding with war, or at poetry which will both take you back to the Gulf War and also telescope you forward into now, this might very well be worth picking up.