Slow War

Benjamin Hertwig

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780773551763
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

Benjamin Hertwig’s debut collection of poetry, Slow War, is at once an account of contemporary warfare and a personal journey of loss and the search for healing. It stands in the tradition of Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” and Kevin Powers’s “Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting.”

A century after the First World War, Hertwig presents both the personal cost of war in poems such as “Somewhere in Flanders/Afghanistan” and “Food Habits of Coyotes, as Determined by Examination of Stomach Contents,” and the potential for healing in unlikely places in “A Poem Is Not Guantánamo Bay.” This collection provides no easy answers - Hertwig looks at the war in Afghanistan with the unflinching gaze of a soldier and the sustained attention of a poet. In his accounting of warfare and its difficult aftermath on the homefront, the personal becomes political.

While these poems inhabit both experimental and traditional forms, the breakdown of language channels a descent into violence and an ascent into a future that no longer feels certain, where history and trauma are forever intertwined. Hertwig reminds us that remembering war is a political act and that writing about war is a way we remember.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• genesis
• first kill
• bush trails
• weekend leave, Wainright to Edmonton
• drunk-driving
• emergent
• night convoy, Kandahar
• rumours, forward operating base Wilson
• guard tower, Kandahar
• ash wednesday, freedom chapel Kandahar
• salat
• first shot
• somewhere in Helmand
• three weeks’ leave, Germany
• rooftop, Panjwai
• somewhere in the desert
• evening at a burnt-out school with the tenth mountain division
• skoal
• easter sunday, forward operating base Wilson
• fruit on a wooden table
• a visit from the prime minister
• care package, Kandahar
• homeward
• iconoclast
• food habits of coyotes, as determined by examination of stomach contents
• tinnitus, or the drive-thru window when you return
• vehicle in flame
• young soldier
• young boy
• home again
• apple-picking, after Afghanistan
• winter buck
• alternate
• desire in sevens
• a compendium of hands
• july 22, 2006
• portrait of a family friend in your bedroom, signed camp Hallein (21/10/45)
• May 2, 2011
• the liturgical leap into monday, or some of the things you wish you’d told your grandfather
• rock picking
• road race, christmas day
• church going
• poem for the dead after war
• poem for the last time you wore your uniform
• Otto after the war
• somewhere in Flanders/Afghanistan
• stigmata
• for the soldier who slept across the hall
• on teaching Tim O’Brien to an amateur hockey team
• visiting the old farm, Alberta
• stories you tell when you wish to love again
• view from a slide you once slept under
• sunday mornings
• remember your body again
• quiet
• a poem is not Guantánamo Bay
• exodus
• Acknowledgments