Ausable Press: Declension in the Village of Chung Luong


ABOUT THE AUTHOR \| SELECTED POEMS \| VIEW CART “With Declension In The Village of Chung Luong, Bruce Weigl achieves the shriven lyric, writing under the prospect of eternal armaments darkening the heavens, as Ingeborg Bachmann foretold. In this 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. With this book, he also returns from his own near-death, tearing from his language all but what is essential, so as to say true things, with resolute fierceness about who we were and who we appear still to be in this faithless now. This is a deeply spiritual book, overseen by the guardians of wandering beings, by which we know it to be genuine, necessary and useful in lighting our way.” —Carolyn Forché REVIEWS & COMMENTS On earlier work: “A sorrow that is painfully keen yet also aware of what is beautiful; a largeness of spirit that is filled with both hard memories and forgiveness; a sense of form and proportion that can hold still, for the incomparable moment of the poem, the most violent movement; and such intense attention to love, loneliness, compassion, sex, suffering, exaltation—what priceless extraordinary gifts Bruce Weigl has carried to us in these poems.”—Reg Gibbons “Weigl’s intensely haunting language and imagery brings to mind other great writers of war literature, including Sigfried Sasson and Wilfred Owen.” —Boston Herald “Bruce Weigl’s war poems are some of the finest in our language.” —The Nation “Weigl’s work is poetry in defiance of physical and moral death.” —Robert Stone