“Bruce Weigl’s 15th collection ofpoetry, Apostle of Desire, reminds me what people were feeling in1968, 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 Ohiosoldier who saw and participated in unshakable human damage. He became,afterward, the preeminent poet of the experience Americans have tried fordecades to dodge. From the start, his poetry’s love of country, and outrage atour failed national morality, echoed Whitman and Melville; the shock anddespair those giants turned into art, their pleas for the future. Apostleof Desire is Bruce Weigl’s chronicle of how one veteran hascarried on a singular postwar détente, including intense and multiple returnsto 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 comehome a pariah and a hero, depending on who was talking, compose a hard miserythat has not yet ended, but his mature poetry becomes a celebration ofVietnam’s rivers, mists, flowers, hand-holding lovers, children, and abundantand joyful human-ness. Weigl’s poems are—make no mistake—tough,unflinching, and demanding in his quest for self-reclamation. That’s what ourcountry trained him to be. But what most stands out in Apostle ofDesire is a kind of holiness like the songs of monks, and thatbarbed, witty, lonesome knowledge only deeply examined experience provides.Whitman’s. Melville’s. I think Apostle of Desire is whatpoet James Wright meant when he said he wanted to write the poetry of a grownman. This complex, serious book is about American conduct. It is grown-up andsplendid.”—Dave Smith
