The Moon Reflected Fire

As a combat wounded Viet Nam vet, myself, I found this book of poetry to be a statement of understanding and camaraderie. I have been writing poetry for decades (including two published books of poetry) and was impressed with this work. I even wrote a poem in response to this book.

In today's literary market place there are enough poets to fill several Yellow Pages and then an L.L. Bean catalog. The result is a chorus of voices that make the emergence and recognition of any one voice daunting. In my estimation, Doug Anderson is one of the few poets who is both smart, intense, and psychologically fearless. In Anderson's work Eros and Thanatos walk, like the lovers they are, hand-in-hand. Perhaps he was born that way, or made that way by experience (being a medic in Nam might be a crucible) but what he brings to his life and his art is the ability to wed the light and the dark in celebration of both, Lorca's duende dancing. And what a dance it is! I can't recommend his work highly enough to poetry readers, and to those who come with fresh ears. Paul Pines

Doug Anderson's poems are the work of a consummate craftsman. They are effective and evocative. There is a precision and beauty to Anderson's lines, even amidst the brutality they explore. It is an essential piece of work, containing some of the essential American war poems of the 20th century--which means this work must be brought with us into the 21st century as well. Like all great literature, the poems in this collection possess a soulfulness and truth that will endure. Anderson is often compared to Tim O'Brien in scope, and I agree with this, but I would also place Anderson next to Wilfred Owen.

This isn't just some of the best poetry from the Viet Nam war. It's some of the best war poetry ever written--not just for the truths it tells, but also for the power and craft of the telling, and its generous range. Anderson brings the brutality of war into vivid relief against the setting in which it occurs: The way he made that corpse dance/ by emptying one magazine after another into it/ and the way the corpse's face began to peel off/ like a mask because the skull had been shattered, brains/ spilled out, but he couldn't stop killing that corpse. A treeline opens into paddies/quartered by dikes, a moon in each,/ and in the center, the hedged island of a village/ floats in its own time, ribboned with smoke. Someone is cooking fish./ Whispers move across the water. He tells of soldiers during lulls before combat: Things live in my hair. I do not bathe./ I have thrown away my underwear./ I have forgotten the why of everything./ I sense an indifference larger than anything/ I know. All that will remain of us/ is rusting metal disappearing in vines... A black snake slides off the paddy dike/ into the water and makes the moon shiver. He tells of combat: the man in front of me steps on a mine,/loses both legs at the hip, and that's not all... And a survivor's life back home: I'm like a country who can't remember the last war./ Well, that's not strictly true./ It's just been too long./ Too long and my heart is like/ a house for sale in a lot full of weeds... Used to be I'd get a bottle/ and drink until the lights went out/ but now I carry my pain around everywhere I go/ because I'm afraid/ I might put it down somewhere and lose it./ I've grown tender about my mileage. Besides all of that there are marvelous poems on Goya's `Disasters of War', a wonderful sequence of replies to Homer, and much more. The Moon Reflected Fire is a masterful, important book of astonishing depth

The Moon Reflected Fire: Poems I am not a poet. But I have a poet trapped somewhere inside me. A not uncommon condition. And that poet often returns to Doug Anderson's poems for nurture and hope. A turning point in human prehistory was when our ancestors learned not merely to manage fire but to create it. In dark times like these we need someone who knows how to strike one word against another and create flame, light, warmth. Doug Anderson's poems in The Moon Reflected Fire are like that, struck from darkness, casting light, giving off the body-and-soul heat of human recognition.