'Nearly Silent. Knowing.'

R.L. Barth has sent me a copy of his first book, Forced-Marching to the Styx: Vietnam War Poems, a chapbook of twenty-one poems published by Perivale Press of Van Nuys, Calif., in 1983, when Bob was already the poet laureate of that war (not that there is much competition for the title). In 1968-69 he was a Marine serving as a patrol leader in the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion. Bob is by temperament and gift an epigrammist. His poems are usually brief and terse, though this collection contains several longer works, including “A Letter to My Infant Son.” At forty-three lines it is by Barthian standards a veritable epic. He claims to dislike it but it’s a favorite of his wife. The opening poem is one of his finest, “Reading The Iliad.” It hints at the French colonial past of Southeast Asia and leaves the dead and those who killed them unidentified. It suggests a sense of solidarity among soldiers separated by millennia: “Volume and desk, coffee and cigarette Forgotten, the reader, held…