John Balaban is an acclaimed poet, novelist, and translator whose work has been influenced by his service in the Vietnam War as a civilian conscientious objector. Balaban, who is Poet-in-Residence and Emeritus Professor of English at North Carolina State University, talked his local draft board in 1967 into allowing him to drop his student deferment and went on to serv in South Vietnam with the International Volunteer Services for nearly two years, including during the 1968 Tet Offensive.
His new book, Passing Through a Gate (Copper Canyon Press, 232 pp. $24, paper; $22.80, Kindle), includes many of his poems, along with several of his translations of Vietnamese poetry, and a few essays that provide background and tie all the rest together.
At the beginning of the poem, “Mau Than,” Balaban writes:
Friend, the Old Man that was last year
has had his teeth kicked in; in tears
he spat back blood and bone, and died.
Pielike, the moon has carved the skies
a year’s worth to the eve. It is Tet
as I sit musing at your doorstep,
as the yellow leaves scratch and clutter.
The beginning of Balaban’s “Saying Goodbye to Mr. and Mrs. My, Saigon, 1972”:
In earlier times poets brushed on printed silk
those poems about clouds, mountains, and love.
Today, when ‘poems are cased in steel,’ poets know
that fine words only limit and lie,
that literary talk only tugs at the ear.
A poet had better keep his mouth shut, we might say.
In one of the essays in the book, Balaban writes about the times that he hitchhiked across America. Once, he says, he did it because he “needed to see America again to figure out whether I could even live in it.”
From “Heading out West”:
…all the while wondering just what I was doing,
not sure where I was going; less sure, why.
But standing there, hanging out my thumb,
squinting at the stream of oncoming cars.
In his poems Balaban is often in conversation with himself, such as when he asks, “Are these birds worth a whole stanza?” If he‘s actually posing the question to the reader, then he is breaking the Fourth Wall.
It was enjoyable to encounter the words “husking, hushing, hosting.” Other delightful moments included when winds “buffet,” a young girl “plunks” a stone into water, fox pups are “frisking,” katydids “chatter,” whirligigs are “spinning,” locusts are “chirring,” and a young girl holds down “her up-fluttering dress.” There is an occasional earthy moment such as when a man “tweaks his balls/through the hole in his right jean pocket.”
Balaban, who helped evacuate war-injured children in Vietnam, received shrapnel wounds in Can Tho during the Tet Offensive. He spent his last year in South Vietnam recording Vietnames folk poetry. During that time, he carried only a green Harvard book bag and a tape recorder.
“Vietnam has a way of never letting one go,” Balaban observes in the book. Much of his own poetry and the Vietnamese poems he has translated into English work help to understand why this is so.
His poetry and other books are widely read in both the U.S. and Vietnam, a fitting remaining tribute to John Balaban, a true international humanitarian.
His website is: johnbalaban.com/
–Bill McCloud
Books in Review II 