A moving, haunting poem on the lasting memories and aftereffects of war that addresses heavy themes with aptness and aplomb.
Hilfiker (Journeys off the Road, 2015) meditates on grief and remembrance in this well-crafted narrative poem.
This work follows Jennifer, a grieving widow, as she visits the grave of her husband, Tom, who died while serving in Afghanistan. She’s the first person to come to the cemetery on Memorial Day; the groundskeeper, Old Steadman, lets her in at the break of dawn. Jennifer’s inner monologue makes up most of the book, although Steadman is also an occasional narrator. Jennifer’s (and Hilfiker’s) central motivations are to find an answer for why Tom had to die and a way to express “what remains unsaid” when remembering those who were killed in military service. Although the action takes place over the course of a single day, Jennifer’s narration careens among the past, present, and an unrealized future; there are vivid descriptions of details as banal as old shopping lists next to weighty retellings of Tom’s deployment order. These “kaleidoscopic thoughts / Once again recurring” allow readers to gain deep insight into Jennifer’s character during her vigil. Hilfiker’s images and metaphors throughout are arresting; one scene, for example, parallels rows of graves with the aisles at Jennifer’s wedding to great effect. The lines are short, sparse, and often anaphoric, and the use of repetition strongly reinforces Jennifer’s grief, with images coming like waves that are impossible to ignore. The author inserts other, found material, including quotes from public figures, into the poem just before the monologue structure threatens to overwhelm it, and the well-placed quotations highlight the distance between public and private forms of remembrance. Hilfiker does offer an interpretation as to why Tom and other soldiers had to die, but he doesn’t force this interpretation on readers. Instead, the poem invites them to ponder the answer for themselves.
A moving, haunting poem on the lasting memories and aftereffects of war that addresses heavy themes with aptness and aplomb.Pub Date: May 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5119-9823-9
Page Count: 80
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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