There It Is

In 1972, Michael Casey won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for Obscenities, a collection of poems drawn from his military experience during the Vietnam War. In his foreword to the book, judge Stanley Kunitz called the work a kind of anti-poetry that befits a kind of war empty of any kind of glory and the first significant book of poems written by an American to spring from the war in Vietnam. Its raw depictions of wars mundanity and obscenity resonated with a broad audience, and Obscenities went into a mass market paperback edition, and was stocked in drugstores as well as bookstores. In the decades since, Caseys poetry has continued to document the places of his work and life. Then and now, his poems foreground the voices around him over that of a single author; they are the words of young American conscripts and their Vietnamese counterparts, co-workers and bosses, neighbours and strangers. His compressed sketches and unadorned monologues have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, and Rolling Stone. There It Is: New and Selected Poems presents, for the first time, a full tour through Caseys work, from his 1972 debut to 2011s Check Points, together with new and uncollected work from the late 60s on. Here are all the locations of Caseys life and work -- Lowell to Landing Zone, dye house to desk -- and an ensemble cast with a lot to say. The publication of Michael Casey's New and Selected Poems, with his quirky portraits of ordinary Americans, is an event to celebrate. Like a photographer snapping pictures relentlessly, he must have written a poem about everyone he ever met with dead-on realism. Compared to him, the Spoon River Anthology is a work for kiddies.