From Both Sides Now
The Poetry of the Vietnam War and Its Aftermath
(amazon)Phillip Mahony (View Bio)
Hardcover: Scribner, 1998; Paperback: Scribner, 1998.
"Wanting to revive awareness of the Vietnam War, which he sees slipping into oblivion because Americans would rather not talk about it, Philip Mahony has crafted a new kind of war-poetry anthology. He has chosen poems by both Americans and Vietnamese; by both adults involved in the fighting and children, now grown, who were displaced by it; and by both combatants and protesters.... Read in order, the poems create a vivid and emotionally powerful panorama of the war and its wake. Only a vast oral history with a vast philosophical novel might surpass this collection's portrayal of how what happened in Vietnam affected the ordinary people swept up in it." — Booklist