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Rating:  Summary: Memories and Meanings of Civil War Review: If you want to find out what a tremendous event was all about--famine, pestilence, war--read the poems written about it. Ever since Homer, or the book of Judges, war poems have been written to tell us what happened, to whom, why. Richard Marius's fine selection, with his introduction to it, opens today's reader to the Civil War's horror, pathos, loss, and the emotions which are easy to forget, or worse still, to romanticize. It's a broad selection, from "John Brown's Body" and "Dixie" to today's meditations, in Derek Walcott's "Arkansas Testament," on the legacy of hostility toward blacks, North and South: the Civil War, to Walcott, is still to be won. Meanwhile a selection of photographs brings those terrible four years even closer. Even at a remove of 140 years, this collection of poems allows us to be moved by them and the passions which still haunt all of us.
Rating:  Summary: Memories and Meanings of Civil War Review: If you want to find out what a tremendous event was all about--famine, pestilence, war--read the poems written about it. Ever since Homer, or the book of Judges, war poems have been written to tell us what happened, to whom, why. Richard Marius's fine selection, with his introduction to it, opens today's reader to the Civil War's horror, pathos, loss, and the emotions which are easy to forget, or worse still, to romanticize. It's a broad selection, from "John Brown's Body" and "Dixie" to today's meditations, in Derek Walcott's "Arkansas Testament," on the legacy of hostility toward blacks, North and South: the Civil War, to Walcott, is still to be won. Meanwhile a selection of photographs brings those terrible four years even closer. Even at a remove of 140 years, this collection of poems allows us to be moved by them and the passions which still haunt all of us.
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