At
the Water Puppet Theater is a haunting collection of poems that weaves together
many things--Vietnam and America, friendship and love, the down-to-earth and
the ghostly--as seen through the eyes of a young soldier and an older self,
whose return to Vietnam transforms both the past and the present. A myriad of
voices and stories resounds in Jim Fairhall's tautly crafted verse.
Praise for Jim Fairhall's Work
"The Vietnam we see here is both lovely and complex, whether we see it through the stunned gaze of the author as a young soldier or through his eyes now, returning to Vietnam as a peculiar kind of tourist, a generation older. Fairhall has a gift for seeing the right thing and for finding a music that will carry it home to us."--John Balaban
"Jim Fairhall writes with . . . straightforward clarity of Vietnam here and now. His eye and ear, and reach, are everywhere. [His poetry] is the . . . work of a man who was once a soldier and knows that life is a grand and precious thing. Here is the panorama of clear memory sprinkled with music and light, myth and history."--Larry Heinemann
"The literature of Vietnam, like that of the Civil War, grows large and weighty, creating our history--[this poetry] adds a new voice. In Jim Fairhall's poetry we have emotion recollected not in tranquility, but searingly. Here is another way of looking through time--a poetry of shifting vision, moving from past to present to past again in precise, accurate, musical language."--James DenBoer
"Jim Fairhall looks back over thirty years to survey the amazements of love and war, the quickness of life and vagaries of history, and finds a dream-like world 'estranged, and yet so intimate, inscribed with histories, one mine.' In the prodigious effort the poet makes to understand his story, he tells us about our lives. He awakens us, and graces us with poetry."--Richard Jones
Jim Fairhall teaches modern literature at DePaul University in Chicago. He
is the author of an award-winning book on James Joyce and an award-winning chapbook
of poems, Dragon Music. In 1970-71 he served as an infantryman in the
101st Airborne Division in Vietnam.
$16.00, 112 pages, ISBN: 0-9708667-6-3
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