War Poetry: A Book of Poetry

By Darrell Baughn

"There is a war within a war." So the first poem opens - and the war within is the one this book never leaves.

War Poetry opens with a prose introduction that places itself, in the author's own words, "in the great tradition of Wilfred Owen and Thomas Hardy," then fires 162 poems - every one of them exactly four lines long, two rhyming couplets each, written out of Iraq and Afghanistan by a soldier who was also a lawyer and is also a poet. Burn pits and IEDs, mortars and Kevlar, a chaplain preaching in the combat zone, a conscientious objector standing before the JAG narrator, rules of engagement whispered into the wind of fate - and, leaking through everywhere, home: long walks on the beach, wine, a single rose beneath the darkness.

The form never breaks, even when the subject does: hearing lost "listening to death on a song," the fuzzy haze after a blast, taps heard too late, a soldier's effects mailed home in a Dear John. The language is raw - profane where the war was profane, funny where the Army was absurd (hurry up and wait; the coffee that kicked his butt; the laundry that took his pictures) - and underneath the gallows humor runs the book's gray refrain: "War poetry is the moment gray until gray."

It closes where it began, with the soldier standing as "the last line of defense" - and with an epitaph he wrote for himself: "Here lies a Soldier so few will never know real / A mind with a poet, a law, another life to steal."

Darrell C. Baughn is a Mississippi poet, attorney, and former Army JAG officer. He writes about love, law, and language from Jackson, Mississippi.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0CQ4LT77K
• ISBN13: 9798871616154
• Release Date: December 2023
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 172 Pages
• Weight: 0.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"