'Nearly Silent. Knowing.'

R.L. Barth has sent me a copy of his first book, Forced-Marching to the Styx: Vietnam War Poems, a chapbook of twenty-one poems published by Perivale Press of Van Nuys, Calif., in 1983, when Bob was already the poet laureate of that war (not that there is much competition for the title). In 1968-69 he was a Marine serving as a patrol leader in the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion.

Bob is by temperament and gift an epigrammist. His poems are usually brief and terse, though this collection contains several longer works, including “A Letter to My Infant Son.” At forty-three lines it is by Barthian standards a veritable epic. He claims to dislike it but it’s a favorite of his wife. The opening poem is one of his finest, “Reading The Iliad.” It hints at the French colonial past of Southeast Asia and leaves the dead and those who killed them unidentified. It suggests a sense of solidarity among soldiers separated by millennia:

“Volume and desk, coffee and cigarette

Forgotten, the reader, held in Homer's mind,

Looks upon Greeks and Trojans fighting yet,

The heroes and foot soldiers, thin and blind,

 

“Forced-marching for the Styx. But suddenly

Stunned by the clamor under smoky skies,

Boastings and tauntings, he looks up to see —

Not the god-harried plain where Hector tries

 

His destiny, not the room; instead, a mountain

Covered with jungle; on one slope, a chateau

With garden, courtyard, a rococo fountain,

And, faces down, hands tied, six bodies in a row.”

 

The chapbook’s closing poem is here titled “Postscript,” later retitled “Fieldcraft”:

 

"At last, the senses sharpen. All around,

I listen closely. Under the dull sound

Of distant artillery, and the shrieking planes

Diving with napalm; under the dry crack

Of automatic rifles; at the back

Of consciousness, almost, one sound remains:

Mud sucking at bare feet as they are going

Between the rice shoots. Nearly silent. Knowing.”

 

As the epigraph to the chapbook Barth uses a line from Graham Greene: “One did not question during the war why one fought: one waited till the war was over for that.”

 

[A partial bibliography of Barth’s work: Deeply Dug In (University of New Mexico Press, 2003); Learning War: Selected Vietnam War Poems (Broadstone Books, 2021); That Mad Game (Scienter Press, 2025); Pleasing the Diners: Translations from the Latin of Martial (Contubernales Books, 2026).]