NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

An independent small press poetry review

JOHN J DUNPHY: OLD SOLDIERS FADING AWAY Pudding House Publications 81 Shadymere Lane Columbus OH 43213 USA ISBN 1 58998 409 9 $8.95 JOHN J DUNPHY: STELLAR POSSIBILITIES Sam Dot's Publishing PO Box 782 Cedar Rapids Iowa 52406-0782 USA ISBN 1 58998 409 9 $6 visit the website of Pudding House Publications email Sam Dot's Publishing Web design by This page last updated: 10th December 2007.		JOHN J DUNPHY: OLD SOLDIERS FADING AWAY
		Prominent author, humanitarian and bookshop owner, John J. Dunphy has written a passionate commemoration to Vietnam Veterans that is stunningly elegant in style. For those familiar with Dunphy's work this will be no surprise - his haiku, haibun and haiku sequences provide a wonderfully satisfying read. Dunphy presents a tableau of small poems that is startlingly rich given the brevity of haiku and haibun. The book's pages recount lives lived in time of war and its aftermath. We read of the Memorial wall, the VA hospital, Purple Hearts, a Nam scrapbook, Veterans Day, causalities, mementos, and much more. These are Vietnam Veterans as we have never seen them before. They are a far cry from the ones we have previously been exposed to ad nauseum - rugged, tough blokes, battle-scarred and battered, unable to return to society. However, Dunphy portrays this culture as sensitive: cleaning the luger he took from a dead German old man starts to cry Not that this social vacuum held them back from seeing beauty where it would be thought impossible Vietnam during the firefight a rainbow Dunphy's spirited book reveals a dialectic between the horrors of war and the beauty that can still be found next to names of war dead pressed flowers from their last battlefield Dunphy cleverly phrases his haiku to free people up from the scars of war: Vietnam Memorial Wall an ex-Marine recruiter salutes three names The haibun use a relaxed narrative manner that is deceptively casual. Dunphy, as it were, remembers the old soldiers and their stories with sensitivity and feeling. With his wit, aplomb and confidence the way in which he introduces us to Veterans and their background is a good deal more sophisticated and complex than its informal patina might suggest. So we meet the belated casualty, the Nam-bound son, Nam vets before "the polished granite of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial", combat-weary GIs, and the women who served during the war. As Dunphy puts it, in his haibun WOMEN OF WAR: Over 2.6 million Americans served in Vietnam during the war. Women comprised about 10,000 of that number. Ninety per cent of them were Army, Navy and Air Force nurses. hospital grunt weeps in a nurse's arms after his amputation Speaking of history, in particular Vietnam history in which Dunphy is richly verses, it was a revelation to me - though to my shame, it should not have been - that so many women served in Vietnam, eight military women, killed in the line of duty, are listed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Dunphy has a sensitive way to summarise the abomination of war - as he writes in FACING THE WALL, where visitors read the names of the "over 58,000 Americans killed during this conflict" - This experience is especially poignant for Nam vets seeking the names of those with whom they served. They will never know a closer reunion with their fallen comrades: Vietnam Memorial aging veterans reflected on names of young men during the Vietnam war life was tough (BATTLE COLORS)- Both sides exchanged automatic weapons fire while they were pelted by cold, drenching sheets of water, but was even harder for many veterans who now battle depression, alcoholism and drug addiction. While commenting on these atrocities the ever poetic Dunphy finds in these indignities a chance to discover the voice of sanity within (BATTLEFIELD MOMENTO) the long-ago battlefield: where a veteran searching for mementos discovers that Over the years nature had effaced all traces of that horrendous engagement and that, Beautiful flowers now bloomed where once men had died. The book concludes with four haiku sequences, THE WALL, VFW POST, RETURN TO THE WALL and OLD SOLDIERS FADING AWAY. The haiku sequence, THE WALL, reminds us of what we have read in FACING THE WALL , that The polished black granite of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC - popularly known as The Wall, which "subtly reflects its visitors." In the sequence we see "four middle-age men", "a young woman" and a wheelchair-bound man, each of whom, in their own way, tries to make sense of their loss. In VWF POST, veterans are in a bar where, amid their drinking binge, they recall the past whilst a lone Nam veteran sits alone drinking quietly In RETURN TO THE WALL more visitors are seen - a wife, a son, a woman, an elderly couple and a man. Whilst they mourn the loss of loved ones, there is a candle left burning on the ground its flames almost out The last and title poem, OLD SOLDIERS FADING AWAY, pictures the casualties of the war: a sleeping man in a flophouse, an Agent Orange victim, a whiskey-drinker, a World War II vet's wheelchair pushed by his Nam son and, "the Nam scrapbook" beside a coffin. The sequence and book end - VFW Post at a back table Nam vet plays solitaire With this haunting vision Dunphy ends his poems about the Vietnam Veterans. From this tapestry of inhumanity, influences, pressures and privations, emerges Dunphy's art. With this richly detailed and enlightening collection, Dunphy has brilliantly captured the horrors of war and its terrifying aftermath.
		reviewer: Patricia Prime.

		JOHN J DUNPHY: STELLAR POSSIBILITIES
		STELLAR POSSIBILITIES is a collection of haiku that are mostly based on the conceit of alien invasion. Taken on a lighter level, the collection raises a wry laugh, if you think in terms of television and film and the development of science fiction, since it's heyday in the 1950s. Not that I am denigrating sci-fi as such — I think that sci-fi tends to tell us more about how humans function as a race than anything much about extra-terrestrial beings. But on a deeper level, there is a branch of literary criticism that is concerned with investigating how we represent "ourselves" and the "other" in relation to ourselves. In this neat A5 booklet of haiku we have a demonstration of that discourse in microcosm, with the added replacing of the "other" with the "alien." With that, I quote a couple of Dunphy's haiku here: their make-out planet the alien teens' parked spaceships form more crop circles communion the alien convert receives a host on each tongue And a special mention for Dunphy's haibun ALIEN INVASION which boxes clever with a drunk's imagined enemy: 2am drunk hurls a rock at the streetlight Overall, an enjoyable and humorous collection of haiku that show a new way of looking at an old premise.
		reviewer: Barbara Smith.