On the Shores of Welcome Home

by Bruce Weigl

Overview

Winner of the Isabella Gardner Award

In this Isabella Gardner Award-winning collection of poems, Bruce Weigl meditates on the ghosts and the grace one encounters in life’s second act. A celebrated poet and veteran of the Vietnam War, Weigl offers a nuanced sense of aging as a departure and death as a returning home. With a sage’s eye for mindfulness and a soldier’s longing for the country where he served, Weigl’s poems reveal the long scars left by Vietnam and the new possibilities one encounters in the wake of life-altering experiences.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781942683896
Publisher:	BOA Editions, Ltd.
Publication date:	10/08/2019
Series:	American Poets Continuum , #176
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

The author of over twenty books of poetry, translations and essays, Bruce Weigl’s most recent collection, The Abundance of Nothing, was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. He has won the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Robert Creeley Award, The Cleveland Arts Prize, The Tu Do Chien Kien Award from the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, fellowships at Breadloaf and Yaddo, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2018, he was awarded the “Premiul Tudor Arghezi Prize” from the National Museum of Literature of Romania. Weigl’s poetry, essays, articles, reviews and translations have appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harvard Review, Harpers, and elsewhere. His poetry has been translated into Romanian, Spanish, Vietnamese, Chinese, Bulgarian, Japanese, Korean and Serbian. He lives in Oberlin, OH.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Bruce Weigl’s On the Shores of Welcome Home deals with life and death matters, embracing earthy questions but always sighting a bead of true light. The mind and flesh of the soldier, of the survivor, of the seeker is laid bare as brotherly love. Weigl is always in at least two worlds at once—present and past; here and beyond. He poses questions of motion and emotion without easy Western answers. In fact, there’s nothing in this map of naked truths that’s easy. And, at times, this speaker of lyric reckoning holds himself accountable for the moments he said ‘I dare you.’ That is, On the Shores of Welcome Home underscores how we are indeed connected—responsible for and to each other. This collection pinpoints days and nights of everyday life under fire, with penetrating grace notes.”
—Yusef Komunyakaa, author of Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems

“Few poets of any generation have written so searingly of the trauma of war, inscribing its wound while refusing the fragile suture of redemption. In this and in the breadth of his accomplishment, Bruce Weigl is one of the most important poets of our time.”
—Carolyn Forché, author of What You Have Heard is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance

"'I don’t think it’s my place to breathe, Mr. Night.,' writes Bruce Weigl, while giving us a sweeping, beautiful collection of poems that breathes deeply as it takes us from Ha Noi to Ohio via elegies and lyrics that are urgent and unsparing in their clarity ('no one / even sees you / standing there in your sixty-two years, soldier'). I opened this book on the beautiful poem, 'The Ineffable as Sad,' and was immediately hooked: in this time of crisis, even in his own uncertainties ('a sky in my head tonight...I don't know what it wants'), Weigl always finds the lyric pulse, a flame of our moment."
—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa

“Bruce Weigl’s unique verbal music is a song indivisible from its experiential roots. Events of childhood in the industrial Midwest, of young manhood flung unwitting into another land and culture, of the years of ongoing pain, of rare joy, of striving and illumination, are one fabric, not episodic.”
—Denise Levertov

Editorial Reviews

09/16/2019

Weigl (The Abundance of Nothing), a Vietnam War veteran, delivers a meditative study of the torment of PTSD, characterizing war-related trauma as a disease: “Like a virus, you can bring another country home with you and not even know,” and an incessant haunting, “The dead people I see are not happy when they know that I see them.” In “Act of Contrition,” the speaker explores the moments that sustain him when life seems unbearable, such as the call of birds in his backyard (“something more human/ than you might expect”) that generates thoughts of spiritual transcendence: “It isn’t god that I’m thinking about/ but something like a god.” Elsewhere, the stirring of tree branches is a movement that “looks like the shiver that love brings/ to your neurons right down to the cells.” Weigl’s personal reckoning with trauma is juxtaposed against the title poem’s polemic against war, a lengthy plea for empathy and tolerance that establishes war, police brutality, mass shootings, and anti-immigrant sentiments as intricately connected through a web of violence Americans have been taught to accept as necessary. While the poet’s language is occasionally abstract, his candor and originality when contemplating his own experiences offers readers an immersive and insightful tableau of the psychological effects of war. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Weigl’s personal reckoning with trauma is juxtaposed against the title poem’s polemic against war, a lengthy plea for empathy and tolerance that establishes war, police brutality, mass shootings, and anti-immigrant sentiments as intricately connected through a web of violence Americans have been taught to accept as necessary.”
—Publishers Weekly

“All of Bruce Weigl's poems are of high quality and all should be purchased for any collection of literature dealing with the Vietnam War.”
—The VVA Veteran

“Bruce Weigl’s On the Shores of Welcome Home deals with life and death matters, embracing earthy questions but always sighting a bead of true light. The mind and flesh of the soldier, of the survivor, of the seeker is laid bare as brotherly love. Weigl is always in at least two worlds at once—present and past; here and beyond. He poses questions of motion and emotion without easy Western answers. In fact, there’s nothing in this map of naked truths that’s easy. And, at times, this speaker of lyric reckoning holds himself accountable for the moments he said ‘I dare you.’ That is, On the Shores of Welcome Home underscores how we are indeed connected—responsible for and to each other. This collection pinpoints days and nights of everyday life under fire, with penetrating grace notes.”
—Yusef Komunyakaa, author of Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems

“Few poets of any generation have written so searingly of the trauma of war, inscribing its wound while refusing the fragile suture of redemption. In this and in the breadth of his accomplishment, Bruce Weigl is one of the most important poets of our time.”
—Carolyn Forché, author of What You Have Heard is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance

"'I don’t think it’s my place to breathe, Mr. Night.,' writes Bruce Weigl, while giving us a sweeping, beautiful collection of poems that breathes deeply as it takes us from Ha Noi to Ohio via elegies and lyrics that are urgent and unsparing in their clarity ('no one / even sees you / standing there in your sixty-two years, soldier'). I opened this book on the beautiful poem, 'The Ineffable as Sad,' and was immediately hooked: in this time of crisis, even in his own uncertainties ('a sky in my head tonight...I don't know what it wants'), Weigl always finds the lyric pulse, a flame of our moment."
—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa

“Bruce Weigl’s unique verbal music is a song indivisible from its experiential roots. Events of childhood in the industrial Midwest, of young manhood flung unwitting into another land and culture, of the years of ongoing pain, of rare joy, of striving and illumination, are one fabric, not episodic.”
—Denise Levertov

From the Publisher