Bone Pagoda

Susan Tichy

In the realm of history, Susan Tichy’s Bone Pagoda takes its title from an ossuary on the Vietnamese-Cambodian border, where the bones of 3000 massacre victims are preserved. In the realm of meaning, it honors the first and final location of every war: the body. These poems are a personal journey through “Vietnam”—the country, the war, and the moral catastrophe signified by this word in American memory. They are also a formal investigation of how language behaves under pressure, both poetic and political. Collage and allusion create a conversation, a community of language by which poets, politicians, soldiers, spies, and resisters are not merely quoted, but lodged in the lyric texture of the poems. The mind’s search for truth—both to find it and to say it—is felt in the shifting rhythms of lines and couplets, in grammatical swerves and incremental changes of phrase or sound, which can also mimic the choices and chances of war.

“Incommensurables suffuse Susan Tichy’s moving and deeply resonant Bone Pagoda. Culled from the gutterings and fragments of contemporary history, from its ghostly visitations and abandoned word-hoards, especially those of America's Vietnam experience, these poems are at once angry, elegiac and yet marked by a severe beauty. ‘So study stutter/warn to mourn’ she tells herself and us. Language tracks loss, both personal and cultural, making of her poetics the discovery of ‘truth in ash.’ These are striking poems, "enlisted in the cause of something real.’” —Michael Heller

“In these incisive poems, Susan Tichy explores Vietnam—the war and the country. She has a keen eye, and her perceptual clusters are widened and deepened by sharp moments of recognition. ‘Someone had drawn red circles / where his eyes would be,’ she writes of a man who begs on the steps of a pagoda. Just as the circles ‘make a place to look,’ so these poems make a haunting place from which to see.” —Arthur Sze