The Stick Soldiers

New Poets of America

by Hugh Martin, Cornelius Eady (Introduction)

At age nineteen, Hugh Martin, a reservist, had to withdraw from college for a deployment to Iraq. After training at Fort Bragg, Martin spent 2004 in Iraq as the driver of his platoon sergeant's Humvee. He participated in hundreds of missions including raids, conducting foot patrols, clearing routes for IEDs, disposing of unexploded ordnance, and searching thousands of Iraqi vehicles. These poems recount his time in basic training, his preparation for Iraq, his experience withdrawing from school, and ultimately, the final journey to Iraq and back home to Ohio.
Hugh Martin holds an MFA from Arizona State University. He is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Genres: Poetry, War

88 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Hugh Martin is an Iraq War veteran and His chapbook, So, How Was The War? (Kent State UP, 2010) was published by the Wick Poetry Center and his full-length collection, The Stick Soldiers, will be available through BOA Editions in March 2013. He is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, the winner of the 11th annual A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize from BOA Editions, Ltd., and the winner of the Jeff Sharlet Memorial Award from The Iowa Review. Currently he is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and lives in Oakland, California.

Reviews

[Craig Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Stick Soldiers joints Brian Turner's "Here, Bullet" as crucial poetry from the Iraq war. Martin's great strength is the clarity of his vision, his precise eye for the details that tell larger stories without didacticism. The voice is honest and direct and there are no poems that break the pace as he moves from basic training to deployment and back to the United States, where the empty words and the gap between those on the home front and the veterans are stunningly effective.

This will have a permanent place in the creative engagement with the recent wars.

[Bored · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Stick Soldiers is Hugh Martin’s first book of poetry and his first book of poetry about his preparation to deploy to a combat zone, his deployment in Iraq, and his transition home following deployment. Martin spent six years in the Army and 11 months in Iraq, so it is no surprise that some of his writing echoes the poetry of other veteran-writers writing about similar experiences. For instance, when Martin writes of the drill sergeant at combat readiness training shouting to the trainees “All of you will go. Half of you will come home horizontal” (“The Summer of Crawling”), I find a line that could belong, in similar voice, to a variety of combat veterans turned poets; however, this does not do a disservice to Martin’s work, rather it reminds us once more how many soldiers heard this or similar statements as they pushed through similar training in preparation for similar combat experiences. Each soldier’s experience differs in many ways, this bond of common experience links them during their deployment and upon their return, creating bonds that only they understand. For civilians, then, such a reiteration of common instances and statements serves to further illustrate the ways in which their experiences connect them across the many years and theaters of the Global War on Terror.

This commonality is not to say that The Stick Soldiers is a common book of common poetry about the war. Martin, unlike any of the war poets I read previously, offers more than his share of gut punches in his writing, especially when he writes about the innocent loss of life in war. I am not naive enough to believe that only the bad guys and heroes die in war (my father is a Vietnam vet, so this is a fact I knew before I could find Vietnam on the map), but Martin’s depiction of the loss of innocent lives and the loss of innocence itself stuns the reader, reminding of us of this sad reality to any war. In “The Stick Soldiers” Martin draws a sharp contrast to the understanding of war by American children, who send Christmas cards with stick soldiers killing stick Taliban soldiers, and the understanding by the Iraqi children who offer American soldiers images of stick Taliban soldiers killing stick American soldiers, drawn in chalk on the sides of buildings–the difference of war to those living the war in their living room and those living the war in their front yard. In “Responding to an Explosion in Qarah Tappah”, Martin again opens the door on innocence in war, telling of a boy who blew himself up in his father’s IED workshop, a tragedy of innocence lost in itself, yet Martin goes further, ending the poem with the imagery of two young girls who “cry softly, moderately, like sorrow was something they were trying for the first time”

The Stick Soldiers contains a lot of other excellent poetry, and Martin’s imagery is tangible throughout the poems. This collection pairs well with Brian Turner’s Here Bullet, for those looking for complementary works, but The Stick Soldiers also stands on it’s own as a new classic of poetry connected to the Global War on Terror. You might also check out Martin’s latest book of poetry, In Country, which continues his incredible visuals and tangible emotion of his deployment.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hugh Martin is an Iraqi war vet and this is his book of poetry mainly about his experiences in the war. That may seem like the most base, simple, explanation possible of this book but it's the only place I can start. The book won the A. Poulin Prize, too. The author has gone on to pursue poetry and writing as his career. Overall, I'm impressed with the quality of the poetry, and you cannot help but to be impressed with the poet, his experience, and his willingness to share it with the rest of us. It is, expectedly, depressing and harrowing in many places. But it is necessary and beyond that, it is a good, robust, collection of poetry. In places I found Martin's approach a bit trite, but his subject matter overall makes up for that. I can only really recommend that you, as a reader, pick it up and read a couple poems and decide if it interests you or not. If your primary goal is to learn about the war and how vets see it now, this book may help but obvious you'll need a wealth of diverse first-person sources to work with . . . but for those who love poetry and are curious about how a poet in uniform looks back on his life at war, this is probably as close to Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon of our own time as you'll find.

[Gavin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hugh's writing is so clean, and so piercing in places, it's like a high-powered rifle shot through the heart. There's no BS to be pondered while out there in the deserts of Iraq, and the poet leaves any and all metaphysical questions about life lingering elsewhere: this genie's bottle produces nothing but searing hard facts and experiences, like the steeled stare an Iraqi local gave the poet during a routine shake down...yet, there's the clincher, the irony of the whole Iraq War for its pawn-soldiers (American or otherwise): each stare of a local, each turn around the corner of a building while on patrol, is nothing if not a metaphysical experience. And, it might even be your last one.

[Gerardo Mena · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book floored me. It absolutely took me back to my Iraq deployment--the sights, the smells, the sounds, the absurdity and, at times, beauty of it all--in breathtakingly described detail. This book is so polished and exquisite it's hard to believe it's a debut from this author. This is a "must have" for any 21st century war collection. It easily rivals Brian Turner's "Here, Bullet." Read this book. You won't be disappointed.

[Karen Douglass · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like is a weasel word when we speak about Hugh Martins's account of his time in Iraq. These poems are beyond gritty, all the way to true. Those of us who sit home in our easy chairs and read poetry need to share his experience. It will not change my life, but it will change the way I look at vets and their families. YOU MUST READ THIS BOOK, even if you NEVER read poetry.

[Ash Ponders · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pictures of war had me breaking in laughter, other poems I could not get out of my throat fast enough. This is good good work. Serious and rigorous work. The author should be proud.

[Whit]

An incredible book of poetry that gives us insight into the Iraq War, a soldier's experience, and its lasting effect.

[Judith Mayer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Powerful imagery of soldiers in a foreign land. Excellent.

[Alexander Thorne · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are some of the best poems ever written. Not just some of the best war poems ever written but poems. Period.