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Heart of War tours life in Civil War
By Katie Gilbert
Library Communications
Posted 4/14/2004
MADISON, Wis.—"I have arranged the exhibits … I unlock the doors, and open them wide." So says poet Carmine Sarracino in the first poem of The Heart of War, the latest poetry chapbook released by the Parallel Press.
In "The Battlefield Museum Guide Speaks," Sarracino serves as a tour guide, inviting readers to visit his poetry on the Civil War. The poems are historically accurate, but Sarracino invents characters and scenarios based on his research.
He takes readers through the early days of war, when soldiers were sent to battle with celebrations and parades. Sarracino continues his narrative, guiding readers through the home front, the battle front and an army hospital.
He provides vivid, graphic descriptions of wounded soldiers from the North, a sobbing Southern woman mourning the days before the war and a battlefield photographer who must document the carnage left on the battlefield. The tour ends at Sharpsburg after the war with a robin poking around in a field that once knew the horrors of battle.
Sarracino, a Rhode Island native, currently lives in Elizabethtown, Pa., and teaches English at Elizabethtown College. He specializes in 19th century literature, particularly the poetry of Walt Whitman. His works have appeared in several journals, including Prairie Schooner, The Beloit Poetry Journal and the War in Literature and the Arts.
The Parallel Press is an imprint of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries. The Heart of War is the 30th poetry chapbook of the imprint and the second to be released in 2004. Poetry chapbooks may be purchased for $10 each or $50 for six. For more information, visit: http://parallelpress.library.wisc.edu/chapbooks/poetry/.
Orders may be sent to:
The Parallel Press
372 Memorial Library
728 State Street
Madison, WI 53706
Phone: (608) 262-2600
E-mail: parallelpress@library.wisc.edu.
Here is a selection from The Heart of War called "Sharpsburg at Sunrise in April, 1867."
The morning blooms out of blackness
as out of nothingness itself.
Faint light
pours a shy green
into pokeweed and mullein,
into the tender, shooting
new grass covering all;
stirs clouds into
bluebrown Antietam Creek;
touches gold
a cord of braid
in the beak of a robin,
her breast reddening
like remembered joy.
On a sandy patch
she snapped the threads
from a rag of sleeve.
Small bones there
in perfect order lay,
like the exhibit
of a marvel:
The Human Hand
(which can
set a gunner's level
or trace at parting
the outline of a lover's chin).
With her prize the robin hops
to the dead mouth of a brass gun.
She glances quick left and right,
then drops straight in—
out of sight.
