Newman 1152.

Only 4 copies in Worldcat.

"Shellburst Pond" -- cover title

Cover art by Vanessa Anne Boze. Inside art by Frank Boehm, 4th Infantry Division Pleiku, Vietnam 1966-1967.

These are poems about combat experience, showing a firefight as a game of chance; soldiers as victims of strategic mistakes in battles like Khe Sanh; prostitution as a vice that empties intimacy of meaning; soldiers' lives as expendable commodities; the fragging of a callous officer; interrogating old men with torture; bodies hanging on barbed wire as musicians to which soldiers dance. In poems about memory, the seatide bears off the memory of children killed; valid war memories consist in remembering the eyes of those slain. Surrealism in some poems in a way of expressing traumatic dislocation of attention, consciousness, identity, and myth. -- Newman 517