Service: Poems

Walt McDonald First-Book Series in Poetry

by Bruce Lack, Robert A Fink

What Bruce Lack offers in the poems in Service is truth―complex, ambiguous, paradoxical, contradictory, impossible―about the experiences of a Marine fighting the Iraq War and the jarring transition that comes with returning home to find the war reduced to background noise for a remote civilian population. Bruce Lack’s forceful, authentic poetry confronts the human cost of sending young men and women to fight a war of questionable justification against an insurgency unbound by rules of engagement. Lack’s poems engage honestly with the frustration of fighting an elusive, ruthless enemy, the guilt of surviving when others do not, and the residual anger that may never leave the generation of veterans of the War on Terror. Written in the voice of the Marine but directed toward and accessible to the civilian, Service is a book that seeks to close the communication gap between the two.

128 pages, Paperback

First published March 15, 2015

Reviews

[Rachel Farrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

To read SERVICE is to learn the rules of engagement, and later, the methods of disengagement, if there can be such a thing. We slip backward and forward in time, one unwitting, vulnerable foot perpetually in enemy territory, one moment searching under the couch for a hair tie and the next moment, “in a hallway I will never be able to describe, I gulp crematorium-hot air and drip sweat onto the flak-jacketed back of my best friend, who will breach the door and survive the next several seconds. When I knee him he moves as if lives depend on it. Lives depend on it.” We feel whisper-close to the action and at the same time impossibly, embarrassingly removed: “Jesus Christ, get up / off the deck, hard-charger, / incoming happens all the time. / If you heard it, it didn’t hit you”—such are the speaker’s directions in “The War According to Master Sergeant Marsh,” a poem that leaves us blushing, brushing desert from our knees, and hardening our hearts. We’re soldiers, too, tramping through the heat and dread, and then “Thirteen Months of Talking to God” comes along to remind us how much we cannot understand: “Lord help / me help us all / Christ Almighty Jesus / let him / stick his head / up / again oh / Jesus— / if you’re there, / look away.”

My full review/interview for MQR: https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mqr/2015/...