Apostle of Desire

“Bruce Weigl’s 15th collection of poetry, Apostle of Desire, reminds me what people were feeling in 1968, blood in our streets and in the streets of Vietnam, where your brother, father, son—or you—faced deadly combat. Weigl was an 18-year old Ohio soldier who saw and participated in unshakable human damage. He became, afterward, the preeminent poet of the experience Americans have tried for decades to dodge. From the start, his poetry’s love of country, and outrage at our failed national morality, echoed Whitman and Melville; the shock and despair those giants turned into art, their pleas for the future. Apostle of Desire is Bruce Weigl’s chronicle of how one veteran has carried on a singular postwar détente, including intense and multiple returns to Vietnam and years spent engaging its culture, life, citizens, shrines, dreams, and especially poets, translating and publishing them in the US, marrying the two languages as redemption. His stories of how it felt to come home a pariah and a hero, depending on who was talking, compose a hard misery that has not yet ended, but his mature poetry becomes a celebration of Vietnam’s rivers, mists, flowers, hand-holding lovers, children, and abundant and joyful human-ness. Weigl’s poems are—make no mistake—tough, unflinching, and demanding in his quest for self-reclamation. That’s what our country trained him to be. But what most stands out in Apostle of Desire  is a kind of holiness like the songs of monks, and that barbed, witty, lonesome knowledge only deeply examined experience provides. Whitman’s. Melville’s.  I think Apostle of Desire is what poet James Wright meant when he said he wanted to write the poetry of a grown man. This complex, serious book is about American conduct. It is grown-up and splendid.”—Dave Smith