Description

Poetry. Elegiac and witty, Bruce Weigl's latest collection, DECLENSION IN THE VILLAGE OF CHUNG LUONG is equally concerned with the destruction wrought by a century of warfare and the private wreckage of the individual life as it confronts its own terminus. In poems that forge consolation from clarity attenuated to the rhythms of the natural, Weigl struggles to reconcile the processes of living under the sign of death: "Plaintive evening bird song, summer half away from us. Our/ nation's Independence Day; we live inside a war"-from DECLENSION IN THE VILLAGE OF CHUNG LUONG. "Weigl is among few poets, as one writing his way not only back from war from which one doesn't ever quite return, but forth into the horror and stillness of its aftermath, carrying his dead and the fallen of the other side, and finding grace among their survivors and descendents"--Carolyn Forche.